SGU Episode 983

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SGU Episode 983
May 11th 2024
NASA's new propulsion technology enhances small spacecraft capabilities for future planetary missions and extends the operational life of existing satellites. Credit: Northrop Grumman
SGU 982                      SGU 984
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
Benjamin Franklin, American polymath
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Starliner launch scrubbed

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is May 8^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: How is everyone this evening?

C: Doing all right.

S: We had a great interview coming up later in the show with Robert Bartholomew about Havana Syndrome. We'll see if that changes anything, but he has a lot of information. But this week, I was really looking forward to seeing the Starliner launch and it got scrubbed.

E: For good reason.

S: Yeah. For a reason.

J: No, but these – look, this isn't the first time that an issue like this has happened. They had a valve problem. There's like 300,000 valves on a freaking rocket.

E: No kidding.

J: And this could literally be just one faulty valve. They said it was making some kind of noise or whatever. It's a good thing that they detected it. And ultimately, they have no choice.

E: Yeah. I read it was – they could hear it as opposed to an instrument lighting up or suggesting a failure of some kind. It was audible.

J: Audible.

E: Audible. You could hear the issue.

J: Yeah. They delayed it until May 17th, which is only – May 6th was the original date. So it's not that far in the future. The thing is they had to freaking – they had to roll it back in to the assembly building.

E: Which takes a long time.

C: Really?

J: Yeah. The Starliner Atlas V had to go all the way. It's so slow. Those machines move so – the crawlers are just – they're like – but let's talk about the mission because this is a cool mission and I think it's something that really needs to take place. They're preparing this new crew capsule. It's called Crew Flight Test or CFT. The goal of it is to certify that it can handle having astronauts going into outer space and ultimately take them back and forth from the International Space Station. It's another vehicle that we're going to need that can go into low earth orbit where we're going to need to shuttle stuff up and down to the space station and shuttle stuff up and down eventually for when we're moving a ton of gear over to the moon.

S: And there will be other commercial space stations like Axiom who can also just buy seats on either the Starliner or the SpaceX Dragon capsules. The good thing here is we'll have two commercial companies that can get astronauts into low earth orbit in the US. So that way that builds in a little bit of redundancy which is great. So if one of the capsules gets grounded for a bit for some reason, there's the other one. So, yeah, it gives us more reliable access to space which is great.

J: Good for emergencies, right?

S: Yeah.

J: So there's two astronauts that are slated to go on this ride. It's Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. Wilmore was a former US Navy test pilot. So they're testing the hell out of it. They're fixing the valve. They're running through their countdowns, the simulated countdowns and launch procedures with the extra time that they have. And this costs 4.2 billion bucks, 4.2 billion.

S: The whole development program you need for the Starliner?

J: Yeah, the Starliner development and everything. Good stuff, man. You know, look, I can't be more overjoyed by all the space stuff that's happening and the amazing stuff that we're going to see. I mean, we will be alive when people are essentially living on the moon.

S: Yeah.

B: Moon base alpha, baby.

S: Obviously, there's a lot of attention on this because it's Boeing and Boeing has been very controversial recently because of their quality issues with their airplane division. This is, I'm sure it's a completely different division during the space capsule, but it's still the same company. So they have to show that, yeah, they are all about quality control and safety. But it's also good to remember that these craft are experimental aircraft, right? These are – that's why there's a test pilot going up. As routine sort of as this become, this is still risky experimental craft, you know? Every time someone goes up, it is a roll of the dice.

J: Oh, yeah.

E: Absolutely. Every time regardless.

C: Scary.

S: But it's sweet when it all works out. And it is like keeping a hundred plates spinning at the same time. You know what I mean? Like getting one of these things so that they can take off. Everything has got to be good. Every system has got to check out. They can only keep the fuel in for so long. Like there's so many things that all have to come together. It's actually amazing when they pull it off.

Cara's Canada weekend (4:52)

C: Well, you guys, I have to tell you, I had an interesting weekend. Can I tell you about it a little bit?

S: Sure.

C: So I was in Calgary in Alberta, Canada, for only the second annual Western Canadian Reason Conference. They call it We Can Reason. There's the keynote speaker there talking about existential philosophy and psychology. But there's a great lineup of folks. Richard Saunders, obviously friend of the show. A few other really interesting people, Hemant Mehta, the friendly atheist. There was a great talk by a woman named Kat McLeod, who told this fascinating story about taking this like herbal supplement when she was a teenager because she had asthma. And it had cow gallstones in it. And so for about 10 months of her life, she was taking something obscene, like 150 times the quantity of basically like prednisone. It would have been like 150 times a normal dose of prednisone for 10 months. She developed Cushing's disease. She ended up destroying her adrenals. She can't drive now because she doesn't make enough adrenaline for it to be safe for her to drive. Horrible story.

E: It's a lifelong condition.

C: Lifelong. But she became an activist. And she teaches medical students now about the importance of understanding somebody's supplement intake, not just their medical intake. So fascinating talk. So lots of really interesting stuff. And then I was very lucky that they took us the next day to the Royal Tyrell Museum, which is Alberta's palaeontology museum. I think it's the only museum in Canada that's just dedicated to paleo.

S: What do they have there?

C: Oh my gosh. So Alberta has a ton of sort of local...

S: Like Albertosaurus?

C: Yeah, like Albertosaurus. Exactly. But this was a...

E: Calgaraptor.

C: ...wealth of specimens. So we got a collections tour from Dr. Craig Scott, and we saw so many beautiful things in the collections.

S: Oh, that's awesome.

C: Yeah, it was really, really fun.

S: Love the behind-the-scenes tours.

C: Uh-huh. It's the best.

S: That's the place to go.

C: Yeah, it's kind of like flying first class, you know? Like you kind of don't want to go back to coach after you've done that.

S: They got the flashy stuff up front, but it's all the replicas and everything.

C: Exactly.

S: But then you go to the drawers in the back, they got the real stuff.

C: You got the real stuff. And you see it in various stages, like the stuff just coming in from the field, the stuff actively being worked on, the stuff being researched is very, very cool.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, let's move on with the show.

News Items

Electric Propulsion (7:30)

• NASA Unveils Game-Changing Electric Propulsion Technology for Future Space Missions  

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S: Jay, you're actually going to start us off with another sort of NASA-related space travel item. Tell us about electric propulsion.

J: Yeah, so NASA recently introduced a groundbreaking electric propulsion system. They always have to make it sound such a huge deal. This is an iteration on technology that we already have, but it's a good iteration. NASA recently introduced their latest and greatest electric propulsion system. This is a non-crewed engine, right? So people will not be flying on ships that are using this. It's called the NASA H71M Hall Effect Thruster, and it was developed at NASA's Glenn Research Center. So the new thruster is essentially an ion engine. You might have heard of an ion engine or an ion thruster. This is a type of propulsion system that is not uncommonly used in spacecraft, but unlike traditional chemical rockets, which these are the... Chemical rockets are the big rockets that you'll see launch at Cape Canaveral or wherever, and they're leaving all of that exhaust after them. That's the residue from the chemical burn. Then that's what those types of rockets use to produce thrust. However, an ion engine uses electric and magnetic fields to accelerate ionized particles, which are charged particles, and this generates thrust. Chemical rockets are super powerful but short-lasting, like Bob, and ion thrusters are weak but can run for very long periods of time. So Bob, when would you use an ion thruster?

B: They're used now for station keeping for satellites, but they could also be used for lightweight probes in space. If they're powerful enough, they can be used to actually go from orbit to orbit. They can break orbit from one planet, say Mars, and then go to another planet or another moon. So they're very useful in that way, something that chemical rockets really can't do. But they typically don't have a tremendous amount of power, so they don't have the delta V. They're not going to have a huge change in velocity that chemical rockets would have, but they can build up to a very, very fast speed. So mainly right now, it's mainly for small, very small probes and for satellites.

J: So they're using xenon gas as the propellant, and this gas is fed into the combustion chamber where it's ionized, and then they strip the electrons out, and then the xenon atoms are used turning them into positively charged ions, and then they use the magnetic and electric field to shoot them out. So it's not like what we would consider a horrible thing for the environment. It's not leaving a lot of residue and bad stuff. The cool thing, though, about this engine that they have now is it's a smaller version of a previous piece of technology, and again, they're going to use this on smaller crafts, and it could theoretically be used on things like the space station. Now, you wouldn't be able to make very sudden and quick movements with it, but if you just wanted to reposition it because you need to move the station away from something that was going to come into its path or whatever, it could definitely do that.

S: I mean, they're already being used on that with small satellites.

J: Now, you could also use this for very, very far away trips away from Earth, right? If you wanted to go into deep space, this would be the type of engine that you would want to use. It's the type of engine that it's accumulating speed right over time, kind of like the solar sail, right, Bob? But slower, or faster. It's faster than a slower sail.

S: It is faster than a slower sail.

J: It sure is.

B: Guarantee that.

S: Yeah. It's interesting that solar sails are also being tested for the same thing. Basically, you use chemical rockets to get into low Earth orbit, and then the solar sail could be used to bring the satellite to a higher orbit, although first you have to get far enough above the atmosphere that the thrust you get from the solar sail is greater than the drag from the sail on the atmosphere. So this technology doesn't have that problem. And also, because this is so small and efficient in terms of the amount of weight that gets converted into thrust eventually, you could use this engine to, first of all, so for example, you could launch a satellite or a probe into low Earth orbit, then use this engine to get it to leave orbit, go to Mars, and get into orbit around Mars, which is not something we can currently do. So this would be the first engine that will really give us that capability.

B: The other thing that we will be able to do that we can't do now is, if you've got a deep space mission, you're sending a probe, a big, heavy probe, sometimes they will have secondary, like secondary probes that could launch off of the primary one and do its own little side science. You know what I mean? But with this new device, they could actually send it far from the primary mission location. It could diverge away from the primary probe and go much farther than previously because it's a better, more efficient engine. And so it can go to more distant moons and planets that it otherwise would have been able to go as a secondary mission.

J: So this engine, too, is also more efficient than previous iterations. This one, they're saying that it's designed to function up to 15,000 hours, and it can process over 30% of a small spacecraft's initial mass in propellant. The earlier systems could process only 10%. So it is significantly more efficient, being able to carry, the ships can carry more fuel and they can last longer. It's just a really good upgrade in the technology.

B: And typical ones nowadays that can do 3,000 hours, this one, this new one does 15,000. So yeah, it's definitely, definitely superior.

S: All right. Thank you, guys.

Blowing Off Steam (13:36)

• A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage? 

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S: Cara, so I want to talk to you about the idea of blowing off steam. The phrase suggests that if you act out, that's going to be somehow helpful if you're angry.

C: Yeah. So there have long been different theories of emotions. What are they? How do we get them? And how do we cope with them and deal with them? Anger, historically, and to the present day, is a problematic emotion for a lot of people because anger is correlated with aggression, and it can be correlated with violence. There are a lot of different therapeutic approaches to trying to mitigate anger. And a longstanding view has been that, I think it's often referred to as sort of like the catharsis hypothesis, but that blowing off anger, smashing things, breaking things, going for a run, yeah, like getting that aggression out is an effective anger management strategy. There is quite a bit of research that we've already seen to the contrary of that. But a new study was just published last month, and it was a meta-analysis of 154 different studies that specifically looked at one very important component of anger. And they tried to answer the question does blowing off steam work? What is the best approach when we're talking about physiological arousal as a function of anger? And so one thing I think that's important to remember is that we're dealing with a lot of constructs here, but generally speaking, when we talk about emotions or feelings, we can kind of think of a graph with a Y and an X axis, or we can think of quadrants. Maybe we can look at it that way. But there are two sort of components that are often used to describe emotions. You've got the arousal level, so high arousal or low arousal emotions, and then you've got the valence, so negative or positively valenced emotions. So for an emotion like sadness, where would you put that? What do you guys think?

E: Low on the first one.

C: Arousal.

E: Yeah, arousal. Higher on the second one.

C: And well, let's call it negative, right? Like positive versus negative. So negative emotion, which is also a low arousal, yeah, exactly. And then you might have something like mania or like really like excitement that might be high arousal, but positive emotion. Anger is really interesting because among most of the negative emotions, they tend to be lower arousal, but anger is very high arousal. And there are a lot of, again, different explanations for why that happens, cognitive explanations, physiological explanations. But going back to the literature like over a hundred years ago, we know that when people are angry, their heart races their pupils dilate, they sweat more, they're ready to fight. That's like not an uncommon experience of anger. Okay. So what do you all think is the best way to combat anger? Do you think it is going to be letting that anger out, venting it, breaking stuff, screaming and yelling? Or do you think it's going to be trying to calm yourself down?

J: Breathing.

E: Well, you say, I mean, when you say best, you mean for the individual or the people around you?

C: For the individual.

E: Because that might not be the same thing.

C: Yeah. The actual thing that reduces anger.

J: Breathing.

C: Breathing?

J: I think it's deep breaths, yeah.

C: Deep breathing.

E: Yeah. I mean, I suppose that would be it counting to 10, right? You know, pausing everything you're doing and just concentrating on counting, that kind of thing.

C: Do you think that that is equal to more effective or less effective than, let's say, going on a run?

J: I think going on a run would be great.

B: I'm leaning towards less effective than going on a run.

C: Okay.

E: I don't know.

C: Right. So it's interesting that even amongst this group of skeptics, right? This kind of commonly held view that sort of like, go on a run, get that energy out of you can be really, really effective. Well, it turns out it's not.

B: Wow.

C: It's not. So when we look at all of these studies, we see some pretty large effect sizes and we see some pretty obvious takeaways. Generally speaking, interventions that reduce physiological arousal reduce anger and aggression. Generally speaking, interventions that increase physiological arousal either have no effect or in some specific cases make it worse.

E: Oh, interesting.

C: There are a couple of caveats to that, and they seem to revolve around team sports. So for some reason, and I think we need more research, for some reason, engaging in either guided sports where there's like a coach or being involved in team sports actually may reduce anger and aggression. And the researchers think maybe that's because of the interpersonal component or maybe it's because it feels like play and it doesn't really feel like catharsis or venting.

E: Yeah, I suppose so. It's also a structured, it's also structured. There are guide rails there within that activity, whereas if you go off by yourself there's nothing to keep you coaching you or otherwise from acting out.

C: Right. When you're running, you're just ruminating. You're just thinking about all the reasons that you're angry, and it's getting worse and worse. So across the board, when we look at the different approaches that were used, there was really no significant difference in the arousal decreasing activities effectiveness. So deep breathing, muscle relaxation, yoga, meditation, mindfulness-based approaches. Basically anything that helped calm people worked. And it reduced both self-report and researcher-observed sort of like symptoms or cues of anger and aggression. Across the board, when looking at some of these more amp up arousal activities, they tended to kind of have no difference. Jogging in particular, though, actually made it worse.

B: Ha!

C: Yeah. And so they believe that perhaps it's because it's like a frustrating activity. Like you said, you're alone, maybe we're ruminating, we're exacerbating that anger. Yeah, venting the anger as well any sort of study where it talked about releasing anger in some sort of way either had no effect on the anger at all, or it may have even made it slightly worse. And so this held true across race, it held true across age, although there were some differences with college students becoming more angry after arousal increasing activity. It also held true after gender or across gender, although similarly, yeah, I think male participants became more angry after arousal increasing. Also they did find some interesting stuff with culture, like individualistic cultures tended to show more anger following arousal increasing activities. They think it could be because the strategies and collectivist cultures tend to be to suppress your anger instead of explode your anger or like vent your anger. And also they found that this held true whether we're talking about a clinical population or not. Like garden variety, plain vanilla research subjects, this held true, but also people who are considered to be criminal offenders and also people with intellectual disabilities. Now this is an interesting thing because we've known for a long time that cognitive strategies work, right? Like CBT approaches, kind of relabeling the source of the anger, relabeling the emotion that you feel in your body. We know that these are really good approaches for anger reduction and anger management. And they found that the arousal reducing activities that also had a cognitive component were more effective than the arousal reducing activities that don't have a cognitive component. And so this is really interesting because with individuals who have cognitive disabilities, some of these cognitive behavioral approaches may not be as effective. Some are, but they can become kind of difficult to track, right, when you're talking about reframing your mind state and things like that. So this is a really good understanding because even in individuals with intellectual disabilities or cognitive problems, arousal reducing activities still work. They still help them with that anger and that frustration. So that's like I think a really, really important takeaway of this study. But across the board this has real practical implications for our own lives, for the lives of the people that we care about, for individuals who are getting mental health treatment, for folks who are living in residential treatment, for little kids who are struggling, for people on the autism spectrum, for individuals with certain disabilities. So you know, it's interesting. But something as simple as breathing, relaxing, counting, this is free, right? This doesn't require a lot of fancy equipment or an expert to help you with it. This is more effective than paying to go to some, what are those things called, where you go and you get a baseball bat and you like smash a bunch of plates?

B: Oh, yeah. Is it rage room or something?

E: Anger, angry rooms.

C: Yeah. Those things don't work. They either don't help at all or they make you more mad.

E: But your brain tricks you into thinking it's working.

C: Well, yeah, I think because you've been told, you know?

E: Well, I mean but there's some kind of chemical release from the something that you're doing, right?

C: It might feel good. I think that's the difference. It feels good while you're doing it, but you're still angry.

E: Right.

C: Yeah.

E: Right. So it's a trick.

C: Right. And it's the goal here.

E: If you do this, you'll feel better. Oh, thanks.

C: To feel good, yes. But isn't it also to reduce the anger and the aggression? You know, and oftentimes, especially when we're talking about court-ordered interventions or situations to reduce antisocial sort of behaviors, yeah, that's really important. We want to get that anger in check so that it doesn't lead to violence or conflict. And yeah, going and bashing up stuff in a room is not the way to do it. That's usually just going to exacerbate the issue.

S: I think it comes from the fact that we're stuck in this narrative that if you have this negative, angry emotion, that your two options are you let it out or you hold it in, right? You either vent it or repress it. But there's a third option, which is you calm it.

C: Yeah, you calm it. And you process it.

S: Yeah, you calm it.

E: It's what Spock would do.

S: So I think, I mean, obviously, repressing it's not good. That's kind of just like turning it inward. But venting it, I think that is more of a kindling kind of thing. It just makes you more activated and angry and whatever. I know like-

C: Yeah. Your arousal level either stays the same or it's even heightened. And we know that what this is kind of telling us is that one of those components, negative consequences of anger is heightened arousal. It's like quick startle reflex. It's quick to become combative. And so maintaining that arousal is not what you want to do in those moments. You want to calm it. And so one of the things that I often say in psychotherapy, when people are dealing with really hard stuff, is that the only way out is through. And sometimes we've got to just get through it. And the best way when we're talking about anger, based on the literature, is to be calm. It's to quiet our minds. It's to relax, to feel our bodies relaxing. And also use some of these cognitive techniques that exist throughout the literature in cognitive behavior therapy, where you're, we call it cognitive restructuring. You're basically changing your thought patterns. You're changing you're thinking about why you're angry. What's the source? Is it because of this, this injustice? And you're reframing in your mind so that you can have a better handle on the situation. So combining those two things, and some of these things like mindfulness-based approaches or progressive muscle relaxation, they really do turn your thoughts inward. And there is a pretty major cognitive component to that. It's not just about your body. It's your body and your mind. And those seem to be the most effective.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

C: Yeah.

Washington Post and Past Lives (26:20)

• Washington Post on Past Lives 

S: Have you guys seen this article in the Washington Post about past lives? We got about 300 emails on that.

C: Oh, yeah. We got so many emails on that.

B: What the hell?

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Yeah. It's very disappointing. You know, I do think I'm seeing an uptick in these kinds of articles in major newspapers. You know, newspapers which are generally, try to be at least high journalistic quality like the Washington Post. But and this has been a problem for a long time of treating anything pseudoscientific or paranormal as fluff and with lower standards. But still you do tend to see it more in lower quality newspapers. But now I think we're seeing it very frequently in any, really in any newspaper. So the article is extremely gullible and it basically treats the whole notion of reincarnation as plausible and as a serious topic.

B: What goddamn year is it?

S: I know, right? And it looks at at children who have behavior which can be interpreted as remembering a past life, right? That's basically what the article is about. It relies heavily on the research of one guy who is always the guy that gets cited. You know how like every pseudoscience has its one sort of academic person that lends credibility to it? So yeah, so it's the researcher's name is Stevenson and he did extensive research looking basically documenting the stories of families where a child, apparently expresses memories that the parents believe may be from a previous life. So the story that is highlighted in the Washington Post article, the child, even as very young at like four years old, has an imaginary friend named Nina. And she has, she tells very and increasingly detailed story about Nina and her life. At one time, the daughter said to her mother, Nina has numbers on her arm and it makes her sad. So this was interpreted as remembering a past life being in a Nazi concentration camp, right? But the story, the way that the article goes, it's just so incredibly naive. It says things that should have been dealt with decades ago. Like why would a child make something up?

E: Why would a child have a fantasy from an imagination?

S: Because that's what kids do, you know? Or it's so like, it's so internally consistent and detailed. It's like, yeah, it's a fantasy life. That's how it works. You could tell a story to yourself and it could be highly detailed. And it's not like the details don't just flip on a dime, right? You could be internally consistent.

C: Well, it's also probably very detailed because the parents are guiding it.

S: Yeah. So now that's another, we're not even getting to that layer, but you're right, Cara, but we'll get to that in a second. We'll put the role of the parents in it. But in addition, just from the children themselves, the other thing is that the parents observe is that it's very, it all seems very mature or adult, like the story that the kids are saying. Or again, incredibly naive, they refer to things that there's no way they could have heard of before, right? So you know, Cara, you don't have a kid, but the rest of us do. And I'm sure you guys tell me if you agree with this, when you have young kids, they come out with shit and you're like, where the hell did you hear that? Right? You are not in control of every bit of information that gets into your child's brain. They are exposed to the general culture through their media. And you think, oh, they're watching cartoons. But I've watched a lot of cartoons with my children at pretty much every age. And one thing that happens is from a very young time, the people who write the cartoons slip in a lot of cultural references for the adults who are watching along with their kids. And the kids absorb everything. They absorb everything.

E: Even if they don't comprehend.

C: They don't need to. They can just mimic.

S: Yeah, they don't necessarily understand the reference, but they get it. They're cultural sponges. Plus they go to school, they talk to their friends, now they have the internet. There's just no way. And also the other thing is, parents will often have conversations in front of kids while the kid's off to the side playing with their toy. And they assume, incorrectly, that the child is not paying attention to what the parents are saying. When, in fact, they are listening to every single word.

E: Yeah, it's like Alexa.

S: Exactly. They are, again, absorbing everything. This notion that they could never have heard of that is just silly. It's just ridiculous. All right. But now, Cara, you mentioned, what about the role of the parents?

C: Right.

S: The thing is, what's interesting is that there are these tidbits in the article which sort of give the game away, but the author doesn't tie them all together.

C: Oh, but the author reports on them without having the insight of what they're reporting.

S: Yeah, without emphasizing, like, but this destroys the whole notion that, anyway. So for example, quoting one expert, they say, if parents ask leading questions or if children learn that certain statements are met with dramatic or enthusiastic responses, it can be difficult to discern whether the child is just trying to please their parents. You think?

E: Sure.

S: Here's another one. This is from another, one of the experts they talked to, Tucker, he said, there's no question that the cases are easier to find in cultures where there's belief in reincarnation. Why would you think that is?

J: Oh, my God.

S: So it's, obviously, as skeptics who deal with these issues all the time, and this is, again, this is our particular set of skills. To us, this is like a very easy narrative to tell, a very easy story to tell. You have a culture of belief, and then the parents are maybe even subconsciously at first just anomaly hunting. Kids come out with things, and every parent I talk to, pretty much, right guys? This kid is so smart. He's like so precocious. Every parent thinks that their kid is like the most brilliant, smartest kid that they've ever had. Because, you know why? Because we have these false assumptions about what's age appropriate, and, right, you know what I mean? And so kids are always exceeding our expectations, because we tend to underestimate what they can do. And then we think, they're brilliant. Nope, they're actually just a normal three-year-old, a normal four-year-old, whatever.

C: Remember that, I'm sure it's a cognitive bias that I can't name, but when you poll, like, Americans, like 90% of them think that they're in the top 50% across the board.

S: Yeah, right. Yeah.

C: And it's like-

S: The above average bias, everyone thinks-

C: Yeah, it's like, that's not possible.

S: Yeah, so kids say things that sound precocious. Again, they're just mimicking the adult culture that they're being exposed to at their level. And parents think, this is odd, like, this kid, they seem to, of course, they are predisposed to believing in reincarnation, that they reach for that as an explanation. And then you get the interaction between the adults and the kids. So then that can bring it to another level. Then you have the researchers coming in, and they can ask leading questions, or they're making all the, the adults are making all the connections, you know what I mean? So it's like a cold reading.

E: Yes, it's parallel.

S: They're throwing out these sort of random tidbits, and the adults are making a connection to something, anytime, in past history, ever, anywhere, you know? Right?

E: It's true. It's true.

S: I mean, and then say, well, maybe you were a World War II pilot, or whatever, like any crazy stuff that they could somehow connect to what the kid is saying.

C: And the thing is, we know this happens. It's why psychologists, and especially like police psychologists, or psychologists who work with the police, who work with children after violent crimes, you cannot put anything in their minds.

S: Right.

C: You cannot lead them at all, because they're just going to go with it.

S: Right.

C: You have to be so careful with how you question children.

S: You can't ask even the slightest leading question, because the kids are sometimes just very attentively and desperately trying to please the adults, you know? Especially when they're getting the spotlights on them, it's like, go, you know?

C: They tell you what they think you want to hear.

S: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, the whole thing was just like, she had the answers in front of her. The author of this article had the answers in front of them. But they didn't, that wasn't the story they were telling, right? The story they were telling was about this is some massive mystery, and there's got to be something going on here. Meanwhile, we're talking about magic, right? This is reincarnation.

E: Right.

S: It's like there's no possible mechanism for this. So it's basically, it's why it's a religious belief, you know? You can't. There's no scientific explanation for this. So anyway, this has no place in like a mainstream journalistic outlet like the Washington Post. Especially without again, I don't know who they talked to for background for this article. They probably did talk to a skeptic somewhere, I could tell you as being the skeptic that some of these journalists talk to for articles. It doesn't affect their narrative. They have the narrative. You get, they'll take one quote from you, here it is, token skepticism. I did my job as a journalist.

E: Yeah. Paragraph 24.

S: Meanwhile, the story is like they open up with the, Nina has this imaginary friend, but whatever.

E: Yeah, they're telling a story.

S: The heartwarming story, yeah. And then the token skepticism. Or the other thing that they do, they didn't really do it in this article, but it's very, very common, is they'll like put in the the token skepticism, and then they immediately negate it by saying, by then quoting the the true believer expert who says something that apparently contradicts it without ever giving the skeptic a chance to respond to it, or they did, but they just left it out.

E: Right. Inconvenient. Can't give them too much, you know.

S: Terrible. Yeah, that article was a complete fail. It was a complete fail. So again, they failed to tell the actual story that is going on here, and instead they told the clickbaity one, right?

C: What vertical was it published under? Like does it have, is it an editorial? Is it, do you know where they published it in? I mean, the sad thing is, it kind of doesn't matter, because very often that information is not very easy to find.

E: Lifestyle.

S: It was in the lifestyle section.

C: Okay, but still.

S: But you know, but I think you're right, it doesn't matter because it was on their main page of their webpage, and you click it just like any other article, you don't know where you're going to. It's not like you have to deliberately go to the lifestyle section to get to this article. It's just one more link.

C: Oh, and I think part of the reason that so many people saw it and so many people wrote to us about it is I subscribe to The Washington Post and I subscribe to The New York Times, and they have a marketing department, and we get push notifications on our phones. And that was one of the articles that showed up as a thing, like, and you know, really that should be reserved for breaking news.

E: Yes, not a lifestyle piece.

C: A lifestyle article that's completely credulous. I don't need to get a notification on my phone, this is really important, you should read this.

E: Well, it's the lobbyists with big reincarnation apparently behind this.

C: It's like so dangerous.

S: Yeah.

E: No, but I mean would you be shocked if there wasn't something? You wouldn't be totally shocked if something like that did exist.

C: Well, because it all feeds in with psychics and mystics and...

E: Of course. Yeah. A little umbrella.

Programmable Living Materials (38:24)

• Marriage of synthetic biology and 3D printing produces programmable living materials 

S: All right, Bob, tell us about programmable living materials.

B: I got to puke first after that last news item. All right, I'm good.

E: Clean your palate.

B: Yeah. Guys, this was really cool. Researchers recently finished a successful proof of concept using plant cells as engineered living materials. I hadn't really heard that phrase before. Using a bioink and 3D printing, they created structures with living plant cells inside that were modified genetically. The goal is to create new materials with engineered properties to take advantage of what biological systems can accomplish. So my thought was, are we on our way to more of a biopunk future than a cyberpunk future? Hmm. All right, let's see. So this was published in ACS Central Science by Ziyu Yu and Zhenghao Di and others. The title of the study was Advanced Engineered Plant Living Materials Through Cell Growth and Transfection Within Tailored Granular Hydrogel Scaffolds. See, now you can't use that one, Steve, for science or fiction. So this news item is one specific example of a relatively new discipline called engineered living materials, which could someday, in my opinion, transform materials we interact with every day from plastics to clothes, even your own house. So what are engineered living materials? Now, we often create new materials that are inspired by biology, right, biomimicry. We've mentioned that many times on the show, but they never really come close to the originals complexity, the biological example that the inspiration came from. Now, for example, we've made shark swimsuits, have you guys heard of them? And they have these tiny ridges that are like the real shark skin, right, which reduces drag when swimming. So what if that shark's bathing suit also healed itself and fits you perfectly always and could also detect minute quantities in the water of not necessarily blood like a shark, but perhaps pollution or anything else that you wanted to be aware of.

E: Harmful bacteria.

B: Right. In your environment. And that's just a minor example of the promise of this kind of technology. So another way to think of engineered living material, it's like material science where the material is kind of alive. The authors describe it this way in their paper, engineered living materials represent an innovative intersection of biology and engineering, heralding a new area of material science. These materials integrate living cells with non-living matrices to create materials with tailored functions, carefully designed to harness the unique capabilities of biological systems. So that was a decent overview of that, I think. The idea with this then is that you create everyday materials with attributes that are often associated with biology like self-healing, oxygen generation, self-regulation, sensing, CO2 sequestration, self-replication, even evolvability, all these things that could be incorporated into materials that we interact with on a daily basis. So they continue in their paper, by merging the traits of living organisms with the stability and durability of non-living substances, engineered living materials offer unprecedented potential for a range of applications from sustainable construction and environmental remediation to advanced medical therapies and progressive biomanufacturing. So interesting potential here. But this isn't a brand new idea. Researchers have had some success in the past using as the living components genetically modified bacteria and fungal cells. They've already done research on this. And one example that I came across sounded really interesting. I'm not sure how far it was developed, but they described it as a wound healing gel that had this bacteria in it that could produce antibiotics only if it detected any pathogenic bacteria in the wound. Pretty slick, right? I mean, imagine you have a cut or a scrape, you put the gel on it. And if it becomes infected in the near future, it will automatically create the antibiotic that you need for that bacteria. That's pretty amazing. So that's just one example of what this potential is. Now, this latest advance is a little bit different. It's probably the first example that I came across of engineered plant living material, EPLM. So it's the same thing, but it uses plants. And the researchers were really excited about this because plants have two great attributes that are great for this application. One is that they are structurally strong, right? And the second, they can photosynthesize. So both of those have the obviously desirable traits of autonomy and energy efficiency. And on top of that, plants can also be genetically modified to make all sorts of valuable resources like pharmaceutical proteins is just one example. Okay. So the goal of this specific proof of concept was to create these intricate EPLM shapes containing genetically engineered plant cells with behaviors that were customizable, okay? This was their goal. To do that, they took a few things. They took plant cells, right? And they mixed the plant cells with a gelatin and hydrogel that was infused with a special bacteria, Agrobacterium tumifaciens. Now, that's a soil bacteria that's used to transfer DNA segments into plant genomes. So that's obviously the vector, right? They're going to have these plant cells, and then they're going to update the genome of the plant using this bacteria. So it's all mixed together. So they mixed all of this together, the plant cells, the hydrogel, the bacteria. They mixed it all together into a substance that they called what I thought was a Bionk. Now, that, my friends, is why I love a liberal use of hyphens because when I first saw B-I-O-I-N-K, I said, well, how do you pronounce that? It looks like Bionk. And then if they just used a hyphen-

C: Bio-ink.

B: Right. Exactly. If they just used a hyphen so that it was Bio-ink, I would have correctly said Bio-ink, and I wouldn't have had to listen to myself actually say the word Bionk, and it was kind of embarrassing even though I was all by myself.

E: Well, just don't tell anyone that.

B: I know. Too late.

E: Cut that out, Steve.

B: Anyhoo, so where was it? Okay, they mixed plant cells, hydrogel, and that genome-modifying bacteria into a Bionk and used that in a 3D printer to make these complex shapes, okay? So then they used a blue light to cure the shapes into these hard structures on the outside, but it had living cells on the inside, and then it was a waiting game. They waited two days, and the bacteria that was in there, remember that soil bacteria, it had enough time to modify the plant cells, basically going inside and modifying the genome of the plant, and then they used an antibiotic wash to kill the bacteria, so the bacteria are now gone and you have just basically the plant cells that have been genetically modified. So the following weeks, as the plant cell grew and reproduced within these hard structures, they started producing the protein that was encoded in that new DNA that the bacteria had introduced, and they knew that this happened even just visually before they even really looked at it closely because they could see the green fluorescent proteins and the red and yellow pigments that the new DNA was meant to produce. They saw it. It's like, there it is, guys. It worked. So I'll conclude partially here of what they said in their paper. In conclusion, they said, these advancements signify a major step forward in the development of self-sustaining, responsive, and customizable living materials with wide-ranging applications from sustainable construction to advanced biomanufacturing, opening up new possibilities for future technological and environmental solutions. Yeah, there's so many amazing possibilities with this. I mean, imagine your house without the conventional technology that's in it, but it can sense the environment and adapt to the environment and heat it or cool it depending on how it senses the environment. So many different things. Your clothes. Your clothes could tell you, oh boy, go inside because the atmosphere today is not good. There's some pollen or pollutants or whatever. So many different things that could be done. And I will end with a cool quote from Janine Benyus, who's a natural science writer. She coined the word biomimicry. She said, and kind of nicely related to this topic, she said, living things have done everything we want to do. Without guzzling fossil fuel, polluting the planet, or mortgaging their future, what better models could there be? So I really like that quote. So yeah, this is fascinating. Look this up online. This is a really cool concept, engineered living materials. I mean, I really think we may be more biopunk than cyberpunk in the future, if this pans out.

E: Any steampunk?

B: Yeah, a little bit of steampunk.

Fighting Holocaust Denial (47:37)

• ADL teams up with Jewish TikTok stars to fight Holocaust denial 

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S: All right, Evan, are we still fighting Holocaust denial? Still?

E: Yeah, not only still, we need to more than ever. Yeah, there's news about this. So yeah, this past Monday, May 6th, was Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. So there has been some news about Holocaust denial, which I'm going to get to in a minute, but I need to provide you with a little background first. I'm sure a lot of you know this already, but we're going to just review it to make sure. The Holocaust was the Nazi regime's state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, along with other non-Jewish people, such as the intellectually disabled, political dissidents, homosexuals, and anyone else deemed undesirable by the regime. And this took place in the 12 years of Nazi rule, 1933 through 1945. The word Holocaust is Greek. Two words in the Greek language, holos, whole, and kaustos, burned. So Holocaust literally means total annihilation. What began in early 1930s Germany as a systematic purging from all the aspects of a normal society, the revocation of civil liberties of people, the property rights, restricted movements, designated living spaces, this all soon turned into the imprisonment of millions of people into a slave workforce, subject to tortures of all kinds, and ultimately ramped up into a final solution of total extinguishment of the Jewish population of Europe, and not to mention plans for other spheres of influence that the Nazis had at the time, including much of the Middle East, North Africa, and westernmost parts of Asia. Six million innocent Jews were killed in the reign of the Third Reich, and many more million non-Jews were also killed. These are all innocent victims at their hands. Beyond that, there were an estimated 3.5 million more Jews who were deemed to be survivors of the Holocaust. Those who actually survived their imprisonment, or managed to escape from imprisonment, or effectively imprisoned themselves by having to go into hiding behind walls of houses or deep into the forests of Europe. And there were relatively few who were lucky enough to escape the combat theater altogether before it was too late. These survivors are also considered, in their own way, victims of the Holocaust. And since 1945, there have been teams, teams I mean, of scholars and researchers from various academic and government institutions that have worked tirelessly assembling the documentation available that has proven well beyond reasonable doubts that the Holocaust happened, and that the number of victims that they've calculated has a very high degree of accuracy. And this effort continues to this day to continue to make sure the historical record is as complete and accurate as possible. Now, we as skeptics, we're very well aware that people will, for all sorts of reasons, go through enormous efforts to justify their own beliefs. And when it comes to the Holocaust, there are some people who deny that these claims of destruction and torture and death caused by the Holocaust, that they're either greatly exaggerated or that the Holocaust is totally fake, never happened at all, and is the grandest of all grand conspiracy theories ever concocted. And Holocaust denial can be traced back to its roots in the 1960s by the efforts of a few individuals. They wrote some books and pamphlets basically stating these claims, Holocaust is unproven, greatly exaggerated. And there were also a few fringe extremist hate groups focused here in the United States, and they would lobby these ideas to influential people in Washington, D.C. But it was in the 1970s, really, where Holocaust denial starts to come from the mouths of some people in academic circles, but mostly from people who specialize in things outside of history literature or engineering. But it really wasn't fringe groups anymore, or lone kooks, it had a tinge of academic legitimacy to it and a new level of recognition. And in the late 70s, most notably the fellow David Irving, you may be familiar with him, he's not a professional scholar, but he was considered to be a very serious writer and researcher on lots of different topics about World War II. He published a book filled with Holocaust denial propaganda, and that brought Holocaust denial to an entirely new level of public awareness. And since then, it's pretty much been off to the races since the late 70s. That genie's out of the bottle. It's never going back in, Steve, to ultimately answer your question. The only question is the amount of damage that it is doing and the strategies we need to implement in order to fight this particular contagion. Which brings us to the news item this week, thank you for your patience, in which the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, which was the foremost anti-Semitism group here based in the United States, they've launched a new campaign titled Spot Lies, Spread Facts. And it's specifically targeting Gen Z, people of Gen Z, and some millennials on social media platforms, particularly TikTok. And it was also launched on May 6th of this year, so just a few days ago. They're utilizing the influence of prominent Jewish TikTok creators to share survivor testimonials and educational content, shedding lights on the realities of the Holocaust and countering false narratives. And these efforts are more needed than ever because it's shown that social media platforms, although they do have policies in place in which they are trying to fight it, it's coming up short. There needs to be more of an effort from the content creators. The leading figures in the TikTok community, and forgive me, I don't know these names, but I did look some of them up, and some of these people have many millions of followers and clicks and views for their videos. Ellie Zyler, Etienne Bernath, Montana Tucker, Carly Weinstein, Tova and Aaron Friedman. These are the leading voices to the cause that are doing this. Here's a statement from Jonathan Greenblatt, who is the ADL's chief executive officer. At a time when denial is rising and general knowledge about the events of the Holocaust is diminishing, particularly among young people, there is a need to reach this demographic with video testimonials and factual information about the murder of the six million Jews. An important focus will be on misinformation. Our creators will help young people to learn how to spot the lies, spread facts, and not repeat or share things about the Holocaust that are false. And there are statistics that bear this out, that more than ever, the younger the people are nowadays, the greater there is an acceptance of Holocaust denial tropes.

S: Don't they watch World War II documentaries all the time like I do?

E: Apparently not, or not enough, or they don't glean those parts correctly. But here, if you'd like some statistics, there have been plenty of polls on this, and as of late, it's been pretty bad. Okay, 2021 Holocaust knowledge among Millennials and Gen Z, this is a 2021 poll, 63% in the national survey, this is the United States, by the way, do not know that six million Jews were murdered, 36% think that the number is actually two million or fewer, 48% of that survey cannot name a concentration camp, not one. There were over 40,000 establishments that could be classified as concentration camps throughout Europe, and certainly some are more popular more well known than others. Half of them practically couldn't name one. And 20% of Millennials and Gen Z in New York, specifically, feel the Jews caused the Holocaust.

C: What does that even mean?

E: That number, they did that on a state-by-state basis, it was kind of between 10% in some states and 20%. Millennials and Gen Z feel the Jews caused the Holocaust.

C: So was the question posed whose caused the Holocaust?

E: Yep, that was the question.

C: What?

E: Right. It's totally backwards. Totally backwards. By contrast, with that 20%, that's for people up to age 18 to 28, but the people 29 to 44, only 8% of people fall into that category. As you get to age 45 to 64, 2% and those over 65, 0%. So there's that line that curve showing that's the younger generation that we have to be targeting specifically in this effort by the content creators who have big TikTok audiences is going to certainly help. It can't hurt any further and it needs to be done.

S: TikTok is such a cesspool. The problem, I think the main problem, Jay and I were just talking about today during our live TikTok streaming event, but which we do every Wednesday, and we're doing the best we can. But the culture on TikTok is that truth doesn't even exist. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant, right? It's all performance. It is all performance and you don't know what anyone actually believes.

E: Oh geez, this is like Alex Jones crazy stuff going on out there. You know, people, right, who don't, who actually don't care, don't know, don't know and or don't care what the truth is and just they'll do it, whatever it takes to get the clicks.

S: It's whatever gets clicks. That's it. How do you think these randos are getting millions of hits by giving nuanced commentary that's fact-based and researched and journalistic integrity?

C: Aren't TikTok videos like 10 seconds long?

E: Up to 60, yeah. But yeah, no, but this generation, this is where they go to also get their news among and most of their information. It's a big problem.

S: And don't read the comments. You want to stay sane.

E: Oh boy. Tell me about it.

S: Oh boy.

Who's That Noisy? (57:33)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Bantha from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

S: All right, Jay. It's Who's That Noisy time.

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

[Slow revving whir]

So first person here said, hi, Jay, Ben here, the French from Japan. It sounds like the server motor of an industrial robotic arm. The low pitch would suggest that it is moving slowly, a feature you generally want to enable when you test if the teaching of the robot was correctly done. The background noise also makes me think that we are in an industrial setting. Next listener named Visto Tutti. He said, this is a tough one. I hear an electric motor spinning something up like then like combustion pistons. So I'm guessing starting up the combustion engine of a propeller airplane. I'm going to keep going, guys. I'm not going to comment on any of these till the end. Kelly Hill said, hi, Jay. I will guess some sort of an assembly line machine, let's say one cutting paper. And the last guest for this week by Jason Weatherholtz said, hello, Jay. It's the cow from the Fisher-Price see and say toy, I think maybe from a very weak pull on the string. At least that one kind of gets there. But I have to tell everyone that guessed this week, including those who I didn't include because there was lots of others, I am so, so very disappointed in all of you. So disappointed in all of you. Listen again. [plays Noisy] And last week was what? What was last week? Huh? What were we celebrating last week? Was it May the 4th? Was it May the 4th be with you, Star Wars guys? Listen again. [plays Noisy] One more time. [plays Noisy] I mean, guys-

E: Come on.

J: That is a bantha from Star Wars episode IV, right? Star Wars, May the 4th be with you. I'm a fan of Star Wars. I don't understand what happened.

E: Right.

J: I thought my people were with me.

E: The very first Star Wars of all the Star Wars is out there.

J: I know. Wait a second. Was a bantha? I think a bantha was actually the first like creature that wasn't humanoid on Star Wars. [plays Noisy] Hello.

E: You could be right.

J: All right. So I'm disappointed. No one guessed it. I had a lot of people saying servo motors and stuff. Okay. But please, contextually, remember next year.

E: Uh-huh!

J: Next year at this time, the episode before May 4th, I will be playing a Star Wars sound. This is your clue! Right, Evan?

E: Heads up, everyone.

J: And I said to myself, it's too easy. They're going to guess it so quick. Oh, my God. I'm going to get a thousand emails. Of course, I know what this is. Not one. Not one.

E: Well, Jay, I mean, we've just been talking about how the younger generation is totally letting us down.

J: I know.

E: This is part of that decay.

J: I know. I try, Ev, I try so hard to teach people about Star Wars, lightsabers, blasters. I don't ever stop talking about it. I don't know, Steve. You tell me what's going on here.

E: Right. How many times have we talked about sand?

J: Okay. All right.

New Noisy (1:00:48)

J: I got a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy is from a listener named PK.

[Baby animal grunting]

So many jokes come to mind.

E: That's baby Carate. Here's what that is.

J: Oh, my God. All right, guys. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. That is the absolute best email you could use to email me. That is the 99% chance of you, of me reading your emails if you send it to that email address.

Announcements (1:01:35)

J: So a couple of announcements. We still have tickets available for the extravaganza, which is happening on August 17th in Chicago, and we have tickets available for the private show, which is happening on August 18th, also in Chicago. I have selected a hotel for the private show. Guys, that will be held at the Hotel Arista. You can go to hotelarista.com, A-R-I-S-T-A. We will be there. There's lots of other hotels in the area if you want to find something else that might be less expensive. We will probably be staying at that hotel, though. There is a two o'clock extravaganza on the 17th, and the private show, our 1,000th episode live, five-hour show, lots of virtual guests, George Hrab. It's going to be epic. That's going to be on August 18th. Go to theskepticsguide.org to check for details.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:02:28)

Email #1: Deep Fakes and Grief

S: So one quick email. We've got an email about deep fakes and grief, and this is based upon an article in Technology Review, which I'll link to. And apparently in China, it's becoming very popular to have, after somebody dies, for companies to make a deep fake of that person where you can virtually talk to your dead mother. You could have a FaceTime chat with them. What do you guys think about this?

J: I don't like it at all.

C: I think that used appropriately, it could be very therapeutic. I do. I don't like the idea of it being like a hobbyist approach. I wish that this were something that was kind of... It's sort of like I think about psychedelic treatment, psychedelic drug treatment. It's like, do it with a therapist, or it's going to go horribly wrong. But I think the clip used appropriately.

S: But this was a Black Mirror episode.

C: Yeah, it was, except there was an actual body, too.

S: Well, then it kept going, and then eventually it became like a robot of a person. But it started with just a, here's a deep fake, and you're just having a conversation with them.

C: And to be fair, there's a difference between a deep fake that somebody else is faking, and a deep fake where it's like the AI has looked at all of their social media posts and read their journals and is actually trying to be them. Does that make sense?

S: Yeah.

C: Like, is it programmed to do something, or is it basically just mimicking all of the data that it's been able to pull based on their personality?

S: So Cara, I think you raised an interesting point. Would this be therapeutic? And do you think, in the right circumstance, it could be? But could it also keep somebody from getting to some kind of acceptance and moving on?

E: Oh, delaying with the coping of it.

C: Yeah. I guess probably a big part of that depends on when it's utilized and what their psychological state was prior to utilization. And those are things that, sadly, I just would like to see some sort of expert involved in this kind of work.

S: We need data. We need data. Yeah. Have any of you guys seen the TV show Extraordinary?

E: I have not.

S: It's a pretty funny British show. In the show, like 10 years ago, everyone gets a superpower, like everybody in the world. When you hit your 18th birthday, you get some superpower.

E: Random?

S: Yeah, random, and all kinds of things happen. The story follows the main character, who does not get it. She's like, she's 24 and never got her power, and she's kind of an all-around kind of lovable loser kind of character.

E: Maybe that is the power.

B: Is she a squib??

S: So her best friend's power is that she can actually be a medium, like dead people can speak through her, like for real. That's her superpower.

B: Legit.

S: Yeah, legit. So she has been channeling her friend's dead father for years. So she will have phone conversations with, and it's actually her father. It's not a simulacrum, right? It's not a deepfake. It's her actual, in the show, it's actually the father, but he's dead. And it causes a lot of tension between her and her mother, because her mother correctly believes that she liked her father better. But anyway, the conclusion in the show, it's a very well-written show, and I thought they explored that phenomenon seriously. And the ultimate conclusion they came to was that it was sort of keeping her from moving on with her life in a certain way.

C: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, Steve, because for individuals that don't want to accept or admit the loss and haven't moved on and haven't engaged in ritual, I could see this being really, really damaging. But I can also tell you that one of the approaches that I use to grief counseling, which is really evidence-based, comes down to, once they're ready, individuals writing a letter to their lost, to their loved one, and being able to express a lot of the unexpressed things. And so having an outlet to be able to do that maybe, is this that different than writing a letter or doing an empty chair kind of technique? I don't know.

B: It is different. I mean, it's one way, which is which is nice, which is good. But the two way, for me, if you want to see the dead, if you want to interact with a dead person or if you want to see them, watch a damn video of them. Watch a video of them if you need to get that fix.

S: Okay. But that's, that, however, Bob, I could definitely see that being looked upon as a quaint, again, a get-off-my-lawn kind of opinion. Because like, yes, for like, for the boomers, like, they're just saying, why take one of those fancy machines, just ride a horse it's like, just watch a video. But the thing is like...

B: Yeah, but Steve... That's bullshit.

S: Let me finish. But interacting, but we're rapidly getting to the point where our media is interactive and backed by artificial intelligence. And it may seem perfectly natural to the next generation or two to have an interactive simulacrum of their lost dead ones. Like, well, yeah, what's the problem with that?

B: Yeah, but they'd be wrong. The problem is, the thing is, it's without some some AI and some, some neuro, I don't know, some high tech, some sort of download or whatever, this is not going to be the person. And in the future, say I have that fake interaction. And then later on, when I'm thinking, I might say my dad, well, I'm going to be thinking of a fake interaction I had with my dad. That's bullshit. I don't want to have memories in my head of me interacting with my dad that was fake.

C: Yeah, but that's...

B: Who the hell wants that in your head? That's ridiculous.

C: That's an empowered choice. So let me give you an example. And I'm just coming up with this completely off the top of my head. Let's say that you are a victim of early childhood abuse. And you've been struggling your whole life to come to terms with this. And all you ever wanted as a child, all you ever really needed as a child was for your parent to accept responsibility, to apologize, to say something kind and loving to you. And a lot of therapeutic interventions are us kind of giving our younger selves the love that they needed. What if you could sit down with your parent and have them say the things you always needed to hear? Would that be a good thing? Would that be a bad thing?

B: Yeah, that can absolutely be beneficial. Is that how they're marketing this?

C: Well, yeah. I mean, we're obviously... I don't know how this is being marketed.

B: I doubt it very much.

C: I see this as a tool like a hammer can build a house or it can crack somebody's skull.

B: For those niche scenarios, absolutely. It could be extremely beneficial. But for the average schmo who just lost somebody and who I think they're actually marketing this thing for, to me, it just doesn't... I would never want to do that. Because to me, it would be a fake. And I would think as I was experiencing it, I'd be like, he'd never say that. He'd never say that. I'd be like, what the hell? This is bullshit.

S: What if it was really good? And what if, Bob, while you're doing that, you're giving feedback, like how accurate and compelling is this? And you keep downvoting the things that are not realistic. And over time, it gets really good at giving you what feels like an authentic experience. But anyway, the thing is, Bob, what you're saying is basically the fact that it's not real would bother you. And what I'm saying is that may not be true in a generation. That the fact that... Because again, what were we just saying about TikTok? It doesn't matter if things are true or not. It's just the experience. It's just the attention. It's the whatever. And that may be the way the culture is going, that everything is basically fake. And the difference between fake and real gets obliterated.

C: You're also saying, like, you're making a value judgement that this would be somehow bad for the person versus being somehow good for the person. And we honestly don't know.

S: We don't know.

C: We do not know. And it would be really interesting to see, could this be therapeutic or could this be deeply detrimental? I think about an elderly man who loses his wife. After he loses his wife, he's probably not going to date again. He might, but he's probably not going to. Many elderly men die very soon after they lose their wives. What if he was able to have her memory nearby for the rest of however long his life still was and engage and not be lonely? Could that not be an incredibly good thing?

S: Absolutely.

B: There's absolutely scenarios where this could be a beneficial thing.

C: And I'm sure there are scenarios that would be very dangerous for people, acting out really difficult fantasies or yeah, just it could get dark really fast. Like, we just have to watch Black Mirror.

E: A parent losing a child, that could be a real tough thing to ever get over.

J: I think it's very dangerous. We have to. I think that we are on a slippery, slippery slope right now of sliding into unreality with our technology that's happening, with artificial intelligence that would enable us to do things that we've never been able to do before, simulate people's voices and likenesses and everything. We have virtual reality. I mean, Steve wrote in a D&D campaign about 30 years ago about a future race that had a virtual world that they all ended up going into and they completely abandoned the real physical world.

C: Yeah.

J: Remember that, Steve?

C: It's already happening to kids.

J: And it's happening. It's totally happening.

C: I saw, Jay, you would love this. I saw an Instagram video the other day of a kid outside of the kitchen window yelling to his dad, who was like standing at the sink, let me back in. And he was like, you're grounded. You're staying outside. And the kid was like, I just want to go to my room. And the dad was like, go get into some trouble, climb a tree, throw some rocks at something. I don't care. He was like, why do you want to come inside? And the kid was like, I just want to play video games and take a nap. And the dad was like, no, you're grounded.

E: Get outside.

C: And it was amazing, this like complete reversal of how it was. Even when I was a kid, we wanted to play outside. We wanted to get away from the house.

J: Yeah. Look, I know things are going to change, but I think that there are certain demarcation lines that we have seen in the recent history of humanity, like social media, that have clearly taken a toll on humanity. Like cell phones, having these screens in our pockets that we are utterly addicted to, shortening our attention spans and making, slowly making us digest content that is meaningless. And now when people die, we're going to be able to simulate them and we're never going to really face any of these real things. You know, I think I might've said this before, but one of the hardest things I ever had to deal with was losing my father. And one of the best things I ever had to deal with in my life was losing my father because that made me grow up so much and made me think about my life so profoundly. Now, I'm not saying that everybody needs this or I'm sure there's lots of situations where it would be a terrible thing. It is a terrible thing, but pain, suffering, loss makes us grow.

C: You sound so existential.

J: It inspires us to create.

C: I completely agree with you, Jay. I completely agree.

J: It's true, though. It makes us grow.

C: I completely agree.

J: It makes us create. It inspires us to change the world, make art, all of these different things that makes humanity unbelievably special. Even if there's not another creature in the universe, if we're it, humanity is special because of that, because of that response, because of the reality that we're steeped in.

S: I'm with all you guys on this, but I think this is what's going to happen, whether or not we think it's the right thing to happen. But I do hope, as Cara says, I do hope that it's a little bit of everything. It'll be good when used in some contexts. It'll be negative and harmful in other contexts. It'll be abused. It'll be leveraged in a lot of good ways. It'll be like everything, right? But the potential for downside is massive. It's going to happen anyway.

B: Don't forget, with increasing technology, the time, I believe, will come when they will be able to do some sort of brain scanning, whether it's destructive or not, and actually create a simulacrum of the person who has died with a fidelity that is surprisingly good and accurate. I think we'll reach that point as well. To me, it's a different type of game than having this fake dead person interacting with you. I just had to throw that out there.

S: All right. Well, we have a great interview for you. Just to note that the full uncut version of this interview is available to our premium members for download. Here is the first 25 minutes or so.

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Interview with Robert Bartholomew (1:15:30)

• Robert Bartholomew, "The Sociologist Specialising in Mass Hysteria & Social Panics"

S: Joining us now is Robert Bartholomew. Robert, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

RB: Thank you.

S: Now, you are a senior lecturer at the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, but you've had a long career involved in things such as mass hysteria and delusions. I don't know if you remember, but back in the 90s, you wrote an article for our newsletter. We were just a local skeptical group, and it was, I think, an excerpt from your book that was coming out at the time.

RB: Yeah. That was on the two mass delusions in New England.

S: Yes.

RB: I can remember that. One was the great New England airship scare of 1909, I believe it was, and then there was another mass delusion in there. I'm trying to think of what that one was.

S: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that as well. I've been long familiar with your work from actually the very beginning of when we were doing this sort of organized skeptical stuff. You wanted to come on to talk to us about the Havana syndrome, which we've spoken about recently on the show and I've also written about on my blog, because this obviously fits very cleanly into the whole mass hysteria thing. Give us a summary of your take on so-called Havana syndrome.

RB: First of all, just to be clear, I am an honorary senior lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. I consider myself a sympathetic skeptic, so I publish books addressing topics on the margins of science like UFOs, lake monsters, hauntings, Bigfoot, and Havana syndrome. What is Havana syndrome? In August of 2017, the US State Department announced that they were investigating reports of American diplomats at their Havana embassy falling sick with mysterious symptoms that were suspected of having been targeted attacks from a sonic weapon, one that used sound waves to make their victims unwell. There were an array of symptoms, the most severe being white matter track changes, brain damage, and hearing loss. In a nutshell, that is Havana syndrome. It's dragged on now for seven years. I am confident that once your listeners understand what has really happened and you hear more than just a sound bite or a short article that people have seen, that you will also side with myself in believing that Havana syndrome is a myth. It's up there with a tooth fairy.

S: I think we agree that a lot of the cases in Havana syndrome do fit well into the psychogenic illness or mass hysteria explanatory system. My question is, for example, if we wanted to use an example of what I think is a similar episode, at least in some ways, is the Pokemon seizure flashing light episode from the 1990s, which I know you've published about as well. In that case, the vast majority, probably 90% or so of the cases were probably or almost definitely just mass hysteria. There was this core of neurological cases, children who had photosensitive epilepsy and had seizures in reaction to the flashing lights that triggered the whole thing. For me, the question is, is Havana syndrome similar to that in that there may have been a couple of genuine cases which triggered the whole thing, or is it 100% psychogenic that was triggered spontaneously or maybe by innocuous cases, people with migraines or benign positional vertigo or something else, but there are zero cases of some kind of an external attack? How do we distinguish between those two things?

RB: Well, look. When I first heard about this in August of 2017, my reaction was, wow, American diplomats in Cuba are being attacked with some type of sonic weapon. The story seems plausible, and the popular story is that neurologist Bob Bala, who I wrote the book with and myself, are basically idiots because we say it's all psychogenic illness because psychogenic illness doesn't cause brain damage, white matter tract changes, and hearing loss. First of all, none of those conditions were demonstrated, but secondly, we have never claimed that all or even most of the victims of so-called Havana syndrome are suffering from mass psychogenic illness or functional neurological disorders, although some, I think it's safe to say, are. To understand what has happened, forget about all this stuff about sonic weapons and microwaves, you have to go back to the beginning and deconstruct the events as they occurred. You cannot do this in a soundbite. You can't do it in a news article or a congressional hearing. That is what happened yesterday, where you just get one side of the story to score political points. Let me tell you how this all started, and I believe that when your listeners hear the full story, they will begin to look at this episode in a different light. You have to go back to 2015. Barack Obama opens the American embassy in Havana, and American diplomats and CIA agents are sent to Cuba, but before they went, they were counseled by State Department personnel to be alert and to expect harassment, because when U.S. diplomats were in Cuba in the past, they were aggressively harassed. This was so pervasive that it became part of CIA folklore, and it's well known in the intelligence community, and reports have been written about it. So people would wake up in the morning in their home in Havana, a diplomat or intelligence officer in the past, and they'd go downstairs, and there would be cigarette butts on their kitchen table, and they didn't smoke. There would be dog poo on their kitchen floor, and they didn't have a dog. Books would be rearranged on their shelves. You'd park your car somewhere, and someone would park behind you within two inches, and you couldn't get out. So this was their way of letting you know that we're watching you. So when the diplomats and undercover CIA agents arrived in Cuba in 2015 and 2016, they found themselves in a hostile foreign country, being constantly surveilled, and this environment created a social paranoia, causing them to be in a high state of alert. In late 2016, a group of CIA officers who were undercover were living near one another in this posh neighbourhood of Havana, when one of them was walking outside of his home, and he was with another officer, and he heard this sound, and he thought it was odd, and he said it was like a beam of sound being pointed at his home. In weeks past, there was a lot of speculation about this, and then he had a headache, ear pain, and he had some difficulty hearing. So in December of 2016, he went to the American Embassy Clinic. Now, these are common symptoms that would be presented at GP offices every day all around the world, but he said that he was convinced that he had been attacked, and it was some type of sonic weapon that he'd heard outside his home, and then he began to actively lobby other CIA officers and diplomats that this mysterious sound may not have only been responsible for his illness, but any other illnesses that the CIA agents and the embassy staff may have been experiencing in recent weeks and months. Now, we know this because a well-known CIA officer named Fulton Armstrong was in Cuba at the time. He later said that the so-called Patient Zero was aggressively lobbying other embassy staff and diplomats to report any unusual symptoms they may have been experiencing. So you got this Patient Zero who then attended the end-of-year New Year's gathering of CIA officers in Havana along with the embassy staff, and he brought with him his phone because he had recorded the so-called attack when he had his symptoms. So he plays it for the other staff, and he tells them that this is what I believe was the attack that occurred, and it coincided with my symptoms. That recording was later analysed and found to have been cricket sounds. In fact, of the first 21 victims in Cuba who reported feeling unwell and hearing sounds, the State Department asked them, can you record these attacks as they're happening? And they did. So eight of the first 21 victims recorded the attacks that coincided with their symptoms. That report was then analysed by a group of specialist scientists who concluded they were the mating call of the Indy's short-tailed cricket. But here's the kicker. That report was kept classified until years later when it was released under the Freedom of Information Act. So back to the story, unbeknownst to the victims that they were hearing cricket sounds, a theory emerged that the agents were being harassed by this secret sonic weapon, and the administration at the embassy in Havana warned their officers that they may likely be being attacked by this sonic weapon. Don't stand or sleep near windows. Now you've got everyone being on the lookout for these strange sounds and feeling unwell. And what happens? People start hearing strange sounds and report feeling unwell, or they remember back in time when they were feeling unwell, and they try to recall any sounds they may have heard at the time. And later, this spread around the world through mass suggestion when the U.S. military and embassy staff and intelligence officers were warned to be on the lookout for strange sounds and feeling unwell. Now, how many people? Over 3 million people were put on alert because there's a lot of military officers and intelligence officers and diplomats around the world. Before long, you've got 1,500 people reporting hearing these strange sounds and feeling unwell. The problem with this whole thing is that the symptoms are so vague as to be reported by nearly everyone who's ever lived in any given week of their life. The symptoms are headache, nausea, dizziness, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, forgetfulness, confusion, insomnia, balance problems, head pressure, ear pain, depression, tinnitus, nosebleeds, you name it. It's probably a symptom of Havana syndrome. And look, the major symptoms, brain damage, a hearing loss, white matter track changes, those have never been demonstrated. So that is the early story. Yep.

S: That's very helpful. Knowing how it originated is, I think, critical. The fact that that patient zero was so aggressive in promoting the idea that this was some kind of an attack is certainly is an important piece of information, trying to figure out how this happened.

RB: Look, that's right, because as an investigator of mass psychogenic illness and other phenomena, it's my job to look at the social, cultural, historical, political, religious backdrop of these stories and look for the anxiety-generating stimulus. And one of the things that has been put out there, particularly by people like Stanford microbiologist David Relman, who chaired two panels that looked into Havana syndrome, is that, well, this theory of mass psychogenic illness is not very credible because you've got highly educated people who have been trained in security who are not easily prone to becoming anxious in situations that they find themselves in. But look, mass psychogenic illness is based on a belief. We all have beliefs. Therefore, we're all potential victims. But I don't believe that the majority of cases are mass psychogenic illness. Particularly around the world, globally, you've got people just waking up in the morning and maybe the night before. They didn't drink enough water and were dehydrated and woke up with a headache and maybe feeling a bit nauseous. And they've been sent a letter from the State Department saying to be on alert, or the Department of Defense, which also sent letters out to the nearly three million personnel around the world, to be on the lookout for strange sounds and feeling unwell. And so now you become hypervigilant in your environment to sounds that you ordinarily may not be aware of, and to your body. You're more aware now of your body functions and any symptoms that you might have that can easily be redefined. So a lot of these people are simply waking up in the morning and redefining an array of health conditions that they were going to have anyway, and placing them under this new label, Havana syndrome.

S: Yeah, hypervigilance is a good term. That's something that we use in neurology as well, because as you know, we see lots of patients who have symptoms which, and the question is, are these symptoms neurologically based or are they psychologically based? Often with individual patients, it's both. There's something neurological that happened, but then there's always a cloud of symptom noise around the presentation. And one of the things that drives that is the hypervigilance. They start to report their symptoms of life, the everyday symptoms that they've had for probably chronically, but now that they're thinking about it, it's like, yeah, I do get numb in my hands or whatever. The things that are probably just other common entities like carpal tunnel syndrome or whatever. Not only is that a good explanation, but it's like, how could you not have that? If you're sending out a notice to millions of people saying, be on the lookout for these symptoms, of course you're going to generate hypervigilance. You can't avoid it.

RB: That's right. Part of this whole thing is the studies in JAMA in 2018 and 2019. Now I'll tell you something that a lot of people aren't aware of, and that is when the original study was done in 2017 and they tried to publish it in 2018 in JAMA and it did come out. In 2017, my co-author, Bob Ballo, who is a leading authority on the vestibular system dealing with spatial awareness and balance, Bob Ballo was sent the article for review from the JAMA editors and Bob looked at it and he rejected it on a number of grounds and they published it anyway and Bob was really surprised by that. Then he eventually contacted me and now when I say a lot of the victims didn't have functional neurological disorders in my view or weren't suffering from mass psychogenic illness, which is a form of functional neurological disorder, when I say something like that, it's also important to know that when you look at the first JAMA study, I think it's clear that the cohort in Cuba, the first couple of dozen patients that were looked at, were likely experiencing functional neurological symptoms. The JAMA study made their conclusions and it got published and the news media picked it up as brain damage, but if you look closely at the JAMA study, what you find is they did not demonstrate brain damage. They said that they were brain anomalies. There's a difference between brain anomalies and brain damage and these are the same type of anomalies that you would expect to find in a group under long-term stress. Now why would they be under long-term stress? Because when they went to Cuba, they had been counseled that you're going to be surveilled 24-7 and be on the lookout for people doing things to you and then later they're told that you're being targeted with a sonic weapon and don't stand or sleep near windows. So I think under any standard, that type of counseling is likely to engender anxiety and that went on for months. If you look at that study, one of the things they said was that the symptoms were not so severe that they couldn't have been engendered by other means, like for example, just through normal variation. So that tells me that they were not that severe.

S: They're talking about the symptoms themselves?

RB: Well, the symptoms and what they got on the brain scans. They were saying that the symptoms were not so severe that they couldn't have been potentially caused by individual variation. That was one of the things they noted in the study.

S: Yeah, and as you know, the findings did not replicate on a follow-up study that was published not too long ago in terms of the neurological changes. At this point, we can say it has not been established that there was any objective changes in neurological findings in the brain associated with Havana syndrome.

RB: One of the problems here is, this is such a big topic to take in, like it took us years to wrap our head around it. I mean, you've got to be an expert in physics and sonic weapons, microwave weapons, insect mating calls, functional neurological disorders, psychosomatic illness, vestibular disorders. This is why I think it's taken the intelligence community a while to figure this out. But they have. The FBI figured this out back in 2018, but that report was kept classified. Just like that report with the analysis finding cricket sounds, that was kept classified too. And publicly, you had politicians in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 coming out and saying, oh, we think these are attacks. And I think they're trying to score political points. But they would have been familiar with the Jason report, which is the one with these specialist scientists that concluded that they were cricket sounds. And they would have been familiar with the findings of the FBI, which were leaked, the conclusions leaked, to a journalist in which they concluded that mass psychogenic illness played a major role and there wasn't a foreign adversary. Now the FBI report's never been released, only leaked. And the Jason report was gotten in about 2021, maybe September, through the Freedom of Information Act. But again, you had reports being publicized that were suggesting the possibility of pulse microwave radiation and some foreign adversary, like the Relman panels. They were being released publicly. The ones that were skeptical, they were being withheld. So that's why I say, when you look at Havana syndrome, one of the problems has been science being mixed with politics.

S: So why were the reports skeptical of Havana syndrome withheld?

RB: That's a good question. I think it's because you've got politicians going on record saying that, like Marco Rubio in Florida, suggesting that this is a real attack, that the Cubans were involved, either with the Chinese or the Russians. He actually said that anybody who was promoting the psychogenic illness perspective was a quack. So when you go on record there, and this is also an issue with, I think, journalists. You know, you've got journalists, well-known investigative journalists like Adam Entos, who's written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, giving really one-sided analyses over years. And now all of a sudden, you've got the intelligence community coming out in March of 2023 and concluding, it is "highly unlikely" a foreign actor was involved. And that this is likely caused by an array of pre-existing conditions, responses to environmental factors like allergies and stuff like that, and anxiety conditions.

J: How about other countries being involved in disinformation about this to make people think that it was done?

RB: Well, I think Russia's sitting there. You know, I mean, is this really hurting their cause to have the Americans on edge and spending all this time and money and resource throwing it down this rabbit hole? It would not surprise me that they are encouraging this belief at this point.

S: You know, because trying to wrap my head around this, it is remarkably difficult to find like really solid objective information about it. Like for example, I agree that the sonic weapon thing is probably not technologically plausible. Although every resource I find seems to think that like a microwave weapon is plausible. I don't know if you came to any different, which says nothing in and of itself about, the nature of Havana syndrome, but just that one question, is it even possible that something like that?

RB: Well, you've got to go back to that movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats, right? For 20 years, the U.S. government from the 1970s into the early 1990s investigated and researched the possibility of remote viewing, right? And then finally they shut it down after 20 years because they concluded there was nothing to it. I can tell you that the U.S. government has experimented with microwave and sonic weapons. Sonic weapons, they have this thing called a long range acoustical device. It's called loud sound to disperse political gatherings and things that governments want to break up and riots and things like that. And they have investigated microwave weapons as well. The problem is there's something called the laws of physics and they don't work very well. The other thing is if you're attacking somebody or harassing someone with a microwave weapon, the experts that we talk to say that you should start feeling hot and like metal around you should feel hot. Your computer should shut down. The Wi-Fi system would shut down. Things like this, which were not reported in Cuba. And the other thing is they recorded those early attacks and you cannot make an audio recording of a microwave. And so the microwave possibility, it reminds me of people claiming alien abductions. And then they say, well, there's likely intelligent life in the universe. Well, yeah, OK, but the universe is a big place. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you were abducted by space aliens or even bolster your argument that much because of the vastness of the universe. Just because there have been experiments in sonic and microwave weapons doesn't necessarily mean that someone has been attacked by a sonic or microwave weapon because we know that they don't work very well. And if they did, why is Vladimir Putin attacking using drones and conventional weapons in Cuba? And then you had that 60 Minutes report come out claiming that in the recent NATO summit, one of the Americans had been struck. That was their words in 60 Minutes, the word struck. And he had symptoms of Havana syndrome, but we're not told what they were. Well, when they're so vague, it's quite meaningless. Vladimir Zelensky was at that conference, that summit. Why not target him? It just doesn't make any sense. And then you've got 60 Minutes making these claims that you've got this guy. I think it was in Tbilisi who was visiting the embassy and his wife was in the laundry and she reached in and she heard this high pitched sound and felt unwell. And then she looked outside and there was a car parked in front of her gate. There's a guy standing out there and he's right in front of her video camera. And that's supposed to be a crack unit of elite Russian agents who were attacking her. For what reason? I don't know. I don't know what you accomplished by attacking the wife of some embassy personnel who's visiting there. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

S: Yeah, I think in terms of the the microwave weapon, the most important detail you mentioned was the absence of other findings that would have been present, such as the heating up of anything metal or the the interference with Wi-Fi and things like that. If the markers of a microwave weapon were absent and that that's pretty telling.

RB: Yeah. And the the big thing driving this, I think partly now it's some embarrassed reporters who are desperately trying to find information that supports what they have been claiming for a number of years. The other thing is that's driving this is David Roman, who is a very respected microbiologist at Stanford University, who had two small panels that looked into Havana syndrome and concluded that the most likely explanation was pulse microwave radiation from a possible attack. But nobody else found this. The CIA didn't find it and they had access to a lot more stuff. The FBI didn't find it. The CDC study didn't find it, nor did the NIH studies.

S: Well, you've definitely filled in some gaps in our knowledge about some of the details going on here. For me, like I didn't I could not find a good description of the original cases because to me that that would have been the most important thing, like what triggered the whole thing. If they were just like spontaneous cases that themselves were even semi plausible, I think it leaves the door open. But yeah, that first case was clearly not any kind of external attack and also was very aggressive in promoting that notion that argues, in my opinion, strongly in favor of the whole thing being mass hysteria, which includes a lot of components, as we discussed, including just hypervigilance. All right. Well, Robert, this has been a fascinating interview. Thank you for giving us so much time.

RB: Look, thank you.

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Science or Fiction (1:44:10)

Theme: Animal eyes Item #1: The four-eyed fish has one pair of eyes for viewing above the water line and one pair for viewing below the water. Item #2: Reindeer are the only animals whose eyes change color seasonally, changing from a gold-turquoise in the summer to a deep blue in the winter. Item #3: Owls do not have eyeballs – their eyes are more mushroom or cylindrically shaped.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Four-eyed fish
Science	Reindeer eyes change color
Science	Owls do not have eyeballs

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Reindeer eyes change color
Bob	Reindeer eyes change color
Evan	Four-eyed fish
Jay	Four-eyed fish

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of sceptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is animal eyes. All facts about the eyes.

E: There's one eye in the word animal. Thank you.

S: Of animals. Here we go. Item number one. The four eyed fish has one pair of eyes for viewing above the water line and one pair for viewing below the water. I number two. Reindeer are the only animals whose eyes change color seasonally, changing from a gold turquoise in the summer to a deep blue in the winter. And I number three. Owls do not have eyeballs. Their eyes are more mushroom or cylindrically shaped. Cara, go first.

Cara's Response

C: I don't know. They all sound plausible, but also ridiculous. The four eyed fish, like the one from The Simpsons.

S: Well, that's three eyed fish.

C: Oh, you're right. It did have three eyes.

E: Maybe in the future it has four eyes.

C: If there is a four eyed fish, one pair of eyes above the water line and one for I mean, that's a great adaptation, right? They would have to probably have different lenses and be completely differently adapted. But if that's true, I mean, I could see that being really, really cool. So yeah, I don't know. I like that. Reindeer with the only animal whose eyes change color seasonally. I mean, A, it seems pretty cool that their eyes would change color seasonally. Gold turquoise in the summer to deep blue. That must have something to do with like the filter of light at those latitudes. So I mean, I could see that. But the thing that bothers me about that one is that it's the only animal because there's other animals that live there in the Arctic. And then owls don't have eyeballs. Okay. But obviously, you specify it's not that they don't have like eyeballs, they're just not ball shaped. So I don't know, like owls have really big eyes. Is that one the fiction? But what? That seems like a crazy thing for you to just make up. I'm leaning towards that one. Okay.

E: Eye makeup.

C: I don't know. I do like the four eyed fish above the waterline. I'm going to go with the reindeer being the fiction that maybe it's not the only animal.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Let's see. The four eyed fish. I'm wondering why does it need to see above the waterline? What's the, what's it getting out of that? What's the advantage of, I mean, does it, I don't know, eat bugs to hell. That's weird. The owls. Yeah. Owls is bizarre. That's bizarre too. But I mean, I could see how mechanically it could potentially work, but man, it's either, it's between that and the reindeer one because so what, so what the reindeer can change. They change the amount of melanin in their iris depending on the season. What the hell, man? I can't do that. I mean, I've seen, I've seen an owl skull and that's a, that's a spherical shaped eye socket. Does that matter? Screw it. I'll say, ah, damn it. Reindeer fiction.

S: Okay, Evan.

Evan's Response

E: Oh, I wanted to hear what Jay had to say first.

C: Of course you did.

E: Because you're all fiction. It's a trick. Four eyed fish. Come on. What really, why would a fish have to have eyes above the, as Bob was saying, eyes above the surface. What fish, it would have to, what, dwell a lot of its time on the surface to have that sort of adaptation? Is that, do some fish have that? And isn't that, isn't that bad for their survival if they they're going to get eaten by all kinds of things. This four eyed fish one is so wrong, which means it's probably right. Now reindeer, only animals who, their eyes change color seasonally. Yeah, this one's a problem too. It's not like it's a, oh gosh, like some sort of camouflage advantage you get for the changing environment. And that doesn't matter does eye, does eye color adapt that way? I don't think so. Then the owls. Yeah. I don't know about the owls. Eyes are more mushroomy. I just, I don't know. I have no idea about that one. It's also very strange. It's the four eyed fish one that's bothering me more than the reindeer one. So I think I'll just go with the four eyed fish, even though, I don't know, just guessing. I can't see an advantage for a fish to have two eyes above the surface like that. Why? Why? Why? Why?

S: Okay. And Jay.

Jay's Response

J: I'm going to take these in reverse order.

E: Yay! I hope that works out for me.

J: I agree that owls do not have what we would consider to be like eyeballs. Like they might look like that, but they're shaped differently. I agree with that. And reindeer are the only animals whose eyes change color seasonally. Yeah, their eyes do change color seasonally. That's to help them deal with the different light intensities. And the, I mean, you know what, I will go back on the, I say that the, wow, this is a tough one, Steve. I hate this because I actually know a little bit about each of these.

S: Yeah, right?

C: Knowing a little bit makes it harder.

J: Fuck. All right. The eyes were viewing above the water. I know that that's true. I know it. I just saw a show on that.

E: Oh. All right.

J: Reindeer. Yes. I just read that about reindeer.

B: Well, your choice sounds pretty damn clear to me.

J: Oh, Bob. No.

E: Go with the owls.

J: I'm going to go with the fish. Fish. Yeah, even though I know it's true.

S: The four-eyed fish?

J: Yeah, it's true, though.

E: I mean, that's the one you're most sure about and you're calling it fiction? Okay.

J: I'm more sure about the other two.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. Okay. Well, you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Owls do not have eyeballs. Their eyes are more mushroom or cylindrically shaped. You all think that one is science. That is science.

B: Nice. Wow.

S: Yeah.

E: No eyeballs.

S: If you look at the skull of the owl, yeah, it's not round.

B: It isn't?

S: No, it really isn't. It's often described as tubular shaped or cylindrically shaped, but actually the back is flared like a CRT monitor. Remember those?

E: Oh, sure. Catheters.

S: Yeah. So to maximize the size of the eyes in the skull, they have this shape, which gives them more depth with, again, with the large retina in the back, but it also completely locks them in place. They can't move their eyes. You guys knew that, right, about owls?

E: Yeah. They turn their heads.

S: They turn their heads. Their eyes are fixed in one position, and they have to look around by completely turning their heads around. They can't move their eyes. So it's all connected to them. So it gives them big eyes, and they compensate for that by having a tremendous range of motion of their neck. But yeah, the eyes are not balls. They are cylindrical.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: I guess we'll go backwards. Number two, reindeer are the only animals whose eyes change color seasonally, changing from a gold turquoise in summer to a deep blue in the winter. Bob and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. And this one is science.

C: Oh.

E: Hey.

C: So they're the only animals. That's cool.

E: Jay, we fished it out.

B: So are they changing the melanin?

S: No.

C: Is it structural color?

S: It's structural color.

C: Yeah, cool.

S: So the reindeer are also the only mammal that can see in the ultraviolet because there's a lot of ultraviolet light bouncing off the snow, basically an adaptation to the extreme Arctic conditions that they're in. And what they believe happens, I'll read this from the abstract. It's very technical. A model is proposed to explain the reversible reformatting of the reflector by seasonal changes in the volume of the interstitial fluid within the two-dimensional photonic crystal of parallel collagen fibrils. So what they think is happening is the persistent pupillary dilation from low light levels in the winter causes pressure changes in the eye, which induce this conformational change in these collagen fibrils, which change their color from gold to deep blue. And they think it also helps them to see in the lighting conditions.

E: Low light.

S: Yeah, in the low light conditions of the winter, of the Arctic winter. Pretty cool.

J: That is cool.

B: Yeah, it is.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All right. And that means that the four-eyed fish has one pair of eyes for viewing above the waterline and one pair for viewing below the waterline is the fiction. But Jay, yeah, there is a four-eyed fish and they do have an adaptation to see both above and below the water. They don't have four actual eyes. They don't have two pairs of eyes. They have one pair of eyes, but their pupil is divided up and down.

C: How did I not catch this? What kind of fish has four eyes?

S: Right. No fish has four eyes. In fact, no vertebrate has four highly evolved eyes.

C: Samn it.

S: The only vertebrates that have four eyes are ones that have primitive eyes. So the lamprey has four primitive eyes, but not four fully formed eyes. So the four-eyed fish, Evan, it sort of lives on the surface of the water, right? And so it has to see both above and below the water. So its eyes are adapted. The pupils are split. So like the above the water half of the pupil has a lens adapted for seeing in the air and the below the-

E: Bifocal.

S: Yeah. It's like bifocal eyes. Not two pairs of eyes though. So the four-eyed fish is a misnomer. It's really just a split-pupiled fish, if you want it to be technically accurate. But yeah. But Jay, you remember just enough about it to be confused by it.

J: Yeah. I know. That's what's deadly about having a little bit of a memory about certain stuff. It really should make all of us question how well we really know anything. You know what I mean?

S: Oh, absolutely. And the other thing is the tiny little details matter. They absolutely matter. I'm usually fairly deliberate in exactly what I say in these items. All right. Well, good job, Evan and Jay.

E: Thanks. Surprising.

S: Yeah. Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:55:24)

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.  – Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790), American polymath

E: "The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned. But it's still nonsense." Benjamin Franklin.

S: Yep. I totally agree with that. We often encounter what I call sophisticated nonsense, right? It's very complex and may have the patina of academia and of scholarship. But it's still rank nonsense all the way down, right? Just with a lot of flowery language and more complicated kind of construction of what they're saying. But it's still nonsense. So yeah, I like that quote. And again, it just shows you all this stuff we think we're figuring out for the first time in the modern skeptical movement. Every generation went through this.

E: That's true.

S: This is the same crap that everyone's been dealing with.

E: Just repackage it. It's remarkable.

S: Right. And Ben Franklin was a skeptic of his time. Do you know who he debunked?

E: Oh, Mesmer.

S: Anton Mesmer.

E: Yes. Yes, he did. Oh, yeah.

C: Because he was also like a hobby inventor.

S: Yeah. He was a scientist.

E: Oh, he was a lot of things. Yes. Yes, he was. Fascinating. Read the book by Walter Isaacson.

S: Walter Isaacson.

C: Oh, right.

E: It's the best ever. One of my favorite books.

C: What I love. I think I watched. Did I watch? Is there a... Oh, gosh. What's his name? Ken Burns documentary about Ben Franklin? There is.

E: Mm-hmm. There is.

C: And I watched that. And I guess I didn't realize how snarky the man was.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Oh, yes.

C: He was so snarky. Like all the social critique and commentary, publishing, all sorts of like rabble rousing things.

E: Especially when he was young, yes. Yeah. Yeah. He did it for a lot of different reasons. Not the least of which to promote the newspapers he owned and all the other things. So he had to come up with content. But absolutely, there was a snark. Boy, he was scathing at times in his attacks.

C: And didn't the whole newspaper thing start just because he was like really good at typesetting super fast? I think that's how he got into it.

E: It sounds right.

C: Yeah.

E: That sounds right.

S: Every documentary I've read or seen about Ben Franklin led me to believe that he really enjoyed his life. You know what I mean?

E: Oh, yes.

S: That guy was... He was working at the whole time. He goes to France. He's just surrounded by beautiful women all the time.

C: Yeah, he did. He left almost all his responsibilities back in the US a lot.

E: Yeah. He was by no means perfect.

C: No. But that doesn't undermine what Steve just said. I do think he was a hedonist to a tee.

S: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure, man.

C: Thanks, Steve.

E: Thank you, Steve.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' 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 info@theskepticsguide.org. 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.

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