SGU Episode 792

This episode needs: proofreading, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 792
September 12th 2020
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 791                      SGU 793
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius, and we’re skeptical.
attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, English writer, inventor, futurist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

Voiceover: 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 Tuesday, September 8^th, 2020, 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: Hello, everyone.

J: Hi.

E: Hi.

S: So we've got to start. I've got to tell you a story.

E: I love stories.

J: I'm already bored.

S: Last night, my wife and I are watching TV before bed, so it's late at night. It's dark outside. And our dog, who you may or may not know, is named Sagan. He was named Sagan before we got him. We didn't name him that. But anyway, he is a good guard dog. So he'll typically bark if things are on the deck, right? So he starts barking. And every time, it's raccoons, right? We have a family of raccoons that live near us, and they always come up to the deck to get the bird seed, right? The bird food. So he starts barking. I'm like, oh, the raccoons are back on the deck. So I go over there. It's like a sliding glass window onto the deck. And I can't see anything with the light off. So I turn the light on to scare the raccoons away. And there are not raccoons on my deck.

E: Oh. It must have been a cat or a—

S: It was a black bear.

C: Cool.

J: How big?

B: When did this happen?

S: Last night.

J: How big was it?

E: Did you take a photo?

S: Hang on. It was on the railing of the deck. It was doing an acrobatic act on the railing of the deck. It had almost gotten into our suet. It bent this steel bar that it was hanging from. Thing must be strong.

C: Black bears are awesome.

E: Oh, jeez. If that thing falls, Steve, it's going to be bad.

S: Yeah. Oh, he would die, I think, if it fell off that. Might have a high death.

E: 20 feet. That's a 20-foot drop at some points.

C: Would it really die?

S: I don't know.

E: A 20-foot fall? I don't know.

S: That's a big fall.

C: Don't they climb trees? Do they fall out of trees?

B: I think they climb down.

S: I took out my phone to take a picture, but by the time I got signed into my phone and blah, blah, blah, I opened up the camera thing, my dog had scared it away. They're very skittish. They're very timid creatures.

C: They're beautiful.

S: They're beautiful. This was a beautiful, beautiful animal. I think it was like—either it was a young female, because it was on the smaller side for a black bear, or it was a yearling, but it was perfect. There was no battle scars or anything. It was just a gorgeous animal. He stared at me for a few seconds, and then he jumped down onto the deck, and my dog continued to bark. We ran onto the stairs. Then he turned around and was looking at us from the stairs like, can I go back for the food? Are they going to go away? What's going on? Then he ran off.

E: Made a risk-benefit assessment, ran.

S: I looked up the statistics on black bears, because there's been an increase in black bear sightings in Connecticut.

C: They're not dangerous.

S: They're not dangerous at all.

C: They just destroy property.

S: There are no cases of black bears harming people in Connecticut, at least any time recently. I looked up the number of reported sightings per town. There's actually only a few in Hamden, where I live. There were five. I reported number six, I guess.

C: Cool.

S: Bob, in Newtown, where you live, 120.

B: 120 what?

S: Black bear sightings this year.

B: I've never seen one here, and I will never tell mom that statistic, ever.

J: Before you continue, though, that could be two bears with all those sightings.

C: Yeah, it could be.

S: Yeah, I know. I know. It's sightings. It's not different bears, necessarily.

E: Yeah, we've got to tag these things.

S: But the number of sightings probably relates to the density of the bears, I would imagine. It's mainly in the northwest.

B: Or the density of the people.

S: Hamden's a very populous town. We're surrounded by forest.

B: Mom has just an unrealistic expectation of what danger she's in. I'm like, Ma, you're 83. Have you ever seen a bear in this entire area of Connecticut? No.

C: But black bears aren't dangerous.

S: They're just not dangerous. They're not aggressive to people at all.

B: Doesn't matter. She has a story. She has a story about her friend whose grandkid was mauled to death by a bear, and that's all she needs.

C: But it's probably grizzly bear.

B: Not in Connecticut. God, no.

C: Oh, it was in Connecticut. Gotcha.

S: Yeah, it's probably not true.

E: What are the chances? That's not a right memory.

B: Right. I searched for it. I'm like, Mom, I could find nothing on the internet about that. That would be kind of big news.

J: As long as you're not wearing your meat necklace, you're okay.

S: Right. So, of course, all the sites recommend taking down your bird feeders. Like, I'm not doing that. I'm not taking down all my bird feeders.

B: Put a bear trap on your stairs.

S: This is a second time. So we saw a black bear on our deck a year ago, and now this year. So if once a year a bear comes onto my deck, who cares?

C: No, that's great. You're lucky.

S: Yeah. That's nothing. The thing is, if they start regularly coming to whatever, wherever your source of food is-

B: If you're on their route.

S: You definitely got to take it down. You got to do whatever you got to do. Because if bears become habituated to that source of food, they'll lose their fear of people and of dogs, and then they could become more aggressive.

C: Well, and also they will destroy your property to get to you.

S: Yeah.

C: They will rip stuff up.

S: They are strong. They will do a lot of property damage.

C: They'll break into your car. Bears are awesome. And they're smart. That's why when we camp in the Sierras here in California, there are bear boxes, which are these lock boxes that you put your food in, where you have to put your hand up under a hood in order to undo it, and bear paws can't fit in there. Because they're smart. They'll figure out how to get into anything.

S: Yeah. If you remember, we talked about the neuronal density item. Bears were up there.

B: Really?

S: Bears have a high neuronal density. They're very smart.

E: They're smarter than the average bear.

B: Ah, nice.

S: Hey, boo-boo. All right.

COVID-19 Update (5:58)

• CNN: FDA rejects oleandrin, an unproven coronavirus therapeutic pushed by MyPillow CEO, as a dietary supplement ingredient

S: Let's get to some corona news. So it was a good update.

E: Really?

S: Well, this is what I predicted should happen. I would have been horribly disappointed if this didn't happen. You remember we talked about oleandrin, the snake oil derived from that poisonous plant, the oleander plant...

E: Good for a dozen.

S: The MyPillow CEO, Mike Linder was trying to hop.

E: Snake oil.

S: Yeah. What I said was, so we start trying to simultaneously do two things. To get approval for oleandrine as a drug and failing that to market it as a supplement. Which I loved the fact that he is exposing the scam that the current United States supplement regulations are.

C: Like inadvertently.

S: Oh, yeah. Maret as a drug or as a supplement. Yeah, they can't be both, it makes no sense either way. So the FDA ruled on his petition. So this is the news and the FDA said that cannot approve this as a drug because you don't have any actual data to show that it works. And then as a supplement they said two things they said we can't approve it as a supplement because you're simultaneously trying to get it approved as a drug.

E: Uh-huh his plan backfired.

C: Awesome.

S: But they said also number two, we have significant concerns about the safety data. Now for a supplement you only have to show that they're probably safe, right? You don't have to prove they're safe you just have to show that they're generally considered to be safe. But the he they couldn't even meet that low standard because it's a freaking poisonous plant, so they denied it on both counts. They would not approve it as an as a new drug and they would not approve it as a supplement. We'll see what happens going forward from here, but it's dead for now, which is good because again, it's just ridiculous.

E: What are the chances this will be used as a rallying cry to get the rules and the laws updated and changed to something more reasonable concerning supplements?

S: Zero.

E: Great.

C: They'll just jump on a new bandwagon.

E: It's more likely that the supplement industry will use it as an excuse to try to weaken the laws. Look, we're keeping this from people it's not fair.

C: Did you guys see that? Okay, so there are nine vaccine candidates right now in phase three one of them just had to be paused as of today.

E: Bad results?

C: Yeah, because of an adverse reaction.

J: What happened, you know?

C: No, we don't know yet. But we know as an adverse reaction in a UK participant in the AstraZeneca trial. So this is why we need full phase three trials. This is why you can't circumvent this process or cut them short because you got to know this kind of stuff and it takes time to figure it out.

S: Yeah, especially with with this disease because it is so the the immunity of it is so complicated it is actually reasonable, it's plausible that a vaccine could provoke an immune reaction that is harmful. And so we absolutely need to study it and animal data is great. It's necessary before you go to human data, but it's not enough. It doesn't replace human data.

C: Yeah, all of these nine vaccines that are in phase three would have already had animal data. That's how they got here. So yeah at this point, it's like 30,000 participants. Not of this trial but across, no, yeah, of this trial within the US so far. And one adverse reaction thus far. Maybe it's something where they can get past it. Maybe it's not, depends on probably how serious it is and how related to the actual vaccine it is or if it's just related to somebody's pre-existing, sensitivity to something or an ingredient in the vaccine. There's so many questions and it's gonna take time to figure that out.

S: Yeah. Meanwhile the pandemic rages on 27 million cases worldwide. 900,000 deaths. We're gonna see a million deaths worldwide before too long. 187 plus thousand in the US. So they're modeling like what's gonna happen going forward and the estimates for the - this is in the United States - the number of deaths by the end of the year by January 1st 2021 is anywhere from 250 thousand to six hundred thousand. But with like three to four hundred thousand being the likely range.

C: So we're like the worst in the world still right?

S: Oh, yeah.

C: Okay.

S: Yeah. India and Brazil are still really bad depending on how you slice the numbers. I think India has more cases, but they're per population it might still be the US. So yeah-

C: Based on GDP. We're doing really poorly, like really really poorly.

S: Absolutely. UK is having another spike. They're having it clamped down again. They're not doing well either. If you look at just the worldwide like daily new cases, it's still as high as it's been. It's still way up there.

C: Spain in a bad way right now, like really scary in Spain. Yes. It's yeah.

S: We're not even seeing the beginning of the end. We're still in the middle of this and we're in the middle of the first wave. If you look at the worldwide-

B: Middle, huh?

S: Yeah, we're in the middle of the first wave and we don't know if there's gonna be a second wave. So obviously we're concerned about its school time in the northern hemisphere. We're getting to cooler weather in the northern hemisphere. And we're getting to flu season in the northern hemisphere which might give us a double whammy. The range depends on how compliant people are with wearing masks social distancing and good hygiene, right? So those are the variables they plug in when they say well it could be as low as like 250,000 could be as much as 600,000. That's all the variables are public compliance of like not doing mass gatherings. And of course- Yes, the enforcement of compliance. Absolutely.

C: And we've got to remember two guys it's only been six or seven months at least in like the rest of the world. It's been longer in Wuhan, in like ground zero, but yeah that seems like a long time and yes, it is a long time. But for a global pandemic, we don't even know seasonality yet. We don't even know if this thing is gonna come back with a vengeance at the same time next year even worse if we don't have a vaccine by then.

S: Yeah, I mean, you know vaccines gonna be critical, to really tamping this down. There's no question and as you were saying, it's still an unknown until we have one. We don't have one.

C: Do you think that the social distancing and the mask wearing and the behavior of people generally is going to decrease flu risk or do you think people? Also, but do you think that'll be tempered by the fact that people are like freaked out to go to pharmacies and go into public and might not get their flu shots.

S: Yeah, so we know that from March that the pandemic basically shut the flu season down several weeks early. So if people do mask wearing and social distancing then that will that will reduce the flu season. But you're right if people don't get their flu shot that will have the opposite effect. But if people do both like if people are really compliant everyone gets their flu shot, they get it super early as soon as it's available. Remember it takes two weeks for the flu vaccine to take effect and we continue to do all of our pandemic social distancing stuff. We should have a very mild flu season.

B: Yeah, but Steve would it also be somewhat mild if people just do the mask and social distancing with but even without getting vaccinated for the flu it could still.

S: Oh, yeah, that'll help them. They're independent. But if you do both, it'll be even better.

B: Sure.

S: Yeah, it's all up to people's behavior. It's all up to people's behavior at this point.

B: Then we're screwed.

S: Just gotta remember we're still in the middle of this thing. This is not over yet. And you always have to wonder ten years from now when we look back on this, then we'll know what phase are we in? And some people have emailed us and they're listening to to our shows from like february where we're talking about the epidemic then in Wuhan. And with the hindsight knowing where it is now, of course at the time we had no idea what we were in for and it's kind of weird to listen back when we're like, hey, don't panic. But who knows, just got to keep an eye on this. We don't know what's gonna happen. Like yes, we do.

E: It's time to panic.

S: Right, so we might you know a few years now we could look back. Oh my god we had no idea that we were in we hadn't even begun yet or whatever. We don't know.

E: The story is still being written.

S: Or maybe it just, this is the final push in it and it goes away.

J: It's the final countdown.

C: Are you trying to get us sued?

J: Look, all I'm saying is this. Steve?

S: Yeah.

J: I want some positivity. All right, it's been a bad year lots of horrible things happen to a lot of people and we need to spread some good stuff.

B: Jay, I think there's reason for hope. If we get a good vaccine anytime in the next six months which is totally possible and you combine that with like therapeutics and hopefully people actually getting the vaccine we could be a decent shape in a year. Really good shape.

S: In a year. Yeah.

C: And here's like a silver lining. I don't know if I would call it a silver lining but the death rate is not as bad as it used to be comparatively. So we know that people are still getting sick from this and we know that some people are still unfortunately dying from this but we know how to treat it better now. And we know like at least here in the US even though we have places that are surging a lot of our infrastructure is not being taxed to the limit anymore. Hospitals have enough ventilators. They have enough beds in most places and they know what to do way better than they did six months ago. So that's good. Your odds of surviving this thing are better than they were at the beginning.

J: Yeah. And also the bottom line is if you haven't gotten it yet and you're healthy right now then you're probably already doing what you need to do to stay healthy, right?

S: Keep doing it.

C: Yeah, keep doing it. Don't get a false sense of security.

J: Right. That was my second point was you have control. I always remind myself like if I have to go to the store like what I do is gonna matter right now and I only need to do it for a little bit. It's not like you're most of us are exposed all day long to people that might have COVID.

S: I am.

J: You are for sure Steve, but we have more control than we then we had six months ago, because we have knowledge and we know what to do.

S: Yeah.

C: That's true. We know what not to do and not to waste our time on and how not to be consumed with the anxiety. We know not to bleach our groceries and we know that this is an airborne thing, so there's certain ways that you could potentially get it and other things are less risky. And I think that's knowledge in that case is power as well.

S: Yeah, we're learning more every day.

B: Yeah, I mean it's funny to think I remember thinking I was poo-pooing masks, this is really early on before we had really any indication. I mean thinking what, they're wearing masks, really? And now when I think back at how I thought it's like damn, I was going by what the experts were saying at the time, but it just seems so silly now. And it seems so obvious. I mean, it's so obvious that it's mask and physical distancing. That's it. That's the two biggies, right?

C: Washing your hands. The three biggies. You've really got to wash your hands.

S: Yeah, but that's number three.

B: Yeah, that's number three and it's more in the four position. The two the mask and the distance. Those are pretty much.

S: That's 90% of it.

B: Yes.

S: All right.

News Items

Using AI to Detect Deep Fakes (18:03)

• Technology.org: Microsoft announced two AI-based technologies to detect deepfakes

S: Well Jay.

J: Yeah.

S: Tell us how AI is gonna save us from deep fakes.

B: Oh boy.

J: So a deep fake is an audio or video file that is it has been some way modified. There's something synthetic about it or fake. The software developers use machine learning and artificial intelligence and for example like a common one that's out there right now is there's a video of Barack Obama talking and saying some really weird stuff and it's funny. So a voice impersonator can mimic Obama's voice. They use the video of the voice actor's face as that person is pretending to talk like Obama and then they map the mouth and the head movements. And then when they combine that with the audio they can actually make a pretty damn good fake version of Obama mouthing these words. And it really does look like him. It's remarkable how well that they can do this. They could they could fake that voiceover. So another thing that they could do is they can map someone's face, head movements and expressions and digitally replace another person's face on top of their face, right? So a lot of phone apps already do this, right? You guys must have like done this with with what's all the stuff that the young people use today. Steve, guys, come on, I know I'm too old for this. What are they?

C: TikTok.

J: Tikok, thanks.

E: MySpace.

J: I don't think TikTok does it.

C: Snapchat.

J: Snapchat does it like crazy. That's right So you could basically have your face be covered with a completely different face. You could have your head wearing some type of funny hat or you have a mustache whatever, what they're doing is they're mapping your face and they know like where the corners of your mouth are. They know where your upper lip is your lower lip is. They know where your nose is, where your eyes are and then they could pretty much resize the image and put it on top of your face and it's kind of moving around as you move your head. This is on your phone today, right? The high-end version of this. Let me give you an example. I saw this amazing video of a Tom Cruise impersonator with Tom Cruise's face mapped onto his face. Now the overall effect was was really good. It was amazing. So behind the scenes what they do is they take a video of the person that they want to mimic. So in this case, they found a video of Tom Cruise just sitting in front of a video camera talking. And I actually know exactly what video that they use because it was one that we covered a long time ago where it was like the leaked behind-the-scenes footage of him talking to people in the Church of Scientology. Anyway, perfect video. So what they do is the software analyzes the facial movements, the head movements, the expressions. And then the more video that they can analyze the better the outcome. So the ideal situation would be that the person sitting in front of the camera is moving their head in every direction that they can and making every facial expression that they could possibly make and then talking. And watching how the mouth moves when they talk. And the software studies all of this and it figures out basically the movement, the places that this person's face will move in the way this person's face will move and they model it. They make not only a visual model of it, but they make a movement model of it. So they know that when this person is for example, says a word that has the letter O in it. What shape does their mouth take right? It's every tiny little nuance that it saves. So then what happens is when the voice actor, the person who's actually playing Tom Cruise in this instance, when they talk the software is able to detect their facial movements and map the other person's facial movements and face on top of it. And it is much more complicated than what I just described but in essence they're mapping your face and they've already done this incredibly detailed mapping of the other person's face and they're able to put one face on top of the other. And the result is really really good. Actually the thing that I thought was the easiest to do that they had a little trouble with and that was matching the skin tone of the perimeter of the guy's head which wasn't Tom Cruise's face. When they put the face on top of it the color was a little off and I'm like out of all the things you'd figure that would be the easiest thing to match. Literally the way the guy opens his mouth, it looks like Tom Cruise's mouth. It looks exactly like the way he moves his lips. Really. It's just so unbelievable what it can do today. All right, so that's one type of deep fake. Here's another kind. This one is called a neural voice puppetry or audio driven facial reenactment. This is when audio of someone talking can be mapped to any face desire to make it look like that person is saying the audio. So as an example, they can take me talking right now and map me just listening to what I'm saying the software can analyze what I'm saying and then you could just see it on a hundred different faces as I'm talking in real time. It could just be moving the mouth of all of these other completely legitimate looking faces of famous people or whoever you would want to use and the mouth movements and the head movements are mapped and it looks really good. Like it's actually odd how well it looks and it's doing it in real time. That's scary. So another thing that they're working on is something called synthetic audio where they use a neural network to take a very small sample of someone talking. So let's say that Steve talked for five or ten seconds. It's incredible what it can do. What it does is it maps and figures out and reverse engineers the way that that person's voice sounds and any inflections that they have in their voice. This includes the timbre, intonation, minor inflections and this enables someone to literally go from text to voice. So they the computer listens to his voice they do this whole analyzing of it which I'm sure takes a long time to process and then you have a situation where I could be typing into a computer and it can be talking in Steve's voice. And of course that is the same, the longer of a sample that they have the more accurate it can be. Of course, it could take a day on an average computer, maybe days on an average computer just to chug through 30 minutes of a video just to get it to where it could do the fake. Now from what I've read, you need about three hours of the the person who you're trying to fake. You need video of them talking and moving their head for about three hours to really get this thing fully tweaked so it can mimic all the movements. But again, as processors get stronger and the software gets better, they're gonna be able to do this in shorter amounts of time with higher accuracy and it's gonna get to the point where I won't be surprised if they could just do a complete absolute synthetic everything. It's mimicking the voice completely and mimicking the face and the facial movements and the gestures and everything completely in real time. I'm sure that we're gonna see that in the not too distant future. In the near future it won't be that far in the future when the average person won't be able to detect a deep fake and this is the turning point. This is gonna be like when the internet came or when you got your first cell phone. As soon as they're out you're gonna look back and not really remember what the world was like before we had deep fakes everywhere. We're just gonna be silly with deep fakes and when the average person can be fooled, man, this is dangerous because you could have a world leader, a fake of a world leader saying something that could be potentially very dangerous. Start a war, start conflicts. Before the truth gets its shoes on the deep fake is out there convincing people that something was said that wasn't said. That's scary. So we have to really be able to deal with deep fakes and companies are starting to develop ways of handling it. So Microsoft as an example, they recently announced that they've created two tools that can detect deep fakes. The first one is called Microsoft video authenticator and its purpose is to analyze both still images and video and it's looking for signs that that the video was manipulated. And the second tool is built into Microsoft's cloud storage platform called Azure. I don't know if any of you guys have heard of this or use it, but it's essentially like like Google Drive but it's meant specifically for business. And what the platform is doing is it's automatically detecting modified or manipulated content of any kind and then signals a user that they're watching either authentic or non authentic video or audio. I could not find anything that benchmarked how well it works with today's best deep fake, but the fact is we're gonna see these big platforms like Google Drive and Amazon's web services AWS. These platforms are gonna have deep fake detection cooked right into the platform and it'll be doing it in real time. You upload a video and then a warning will pop up, hey, this has been altered and look at a video sample of what we detected in the video. It's probably gonna be something along those lines.

B: Yeah, but Jay, I think that's that's okay. Maybe for the next couple years. And even from what I've read about those, they're only like two third, 66% accurate on good deep fake videos that they've never seen before. So even that's not that great, but the deep fakes aren't that awesome yet either. I think what we need to be doing instead of just focusing on let's detect these, let's work on software to detect them, which we should do, but we also need to prepare for the when the time comes that we can't detect the fake. What do we do? How do you combat that? Anticipate what's gonna happen. That's what we really need to be talking about now. That's got to be a huge part of this discussion.

J: Well, here's the only one that I found Bob. It's called blockchain, right? This is what some crypto currencies used to to make sure that you can't hack in and create your own Bitcoin for example. So blockchain is essentially, what would you call it Bob? Peer-to-peer encryption? It's encryption that happens that you absolutely can't crack it and you have to have the key to unencrypt it. So it's very very secure. If you're using like a situation this where you have a video that's being captured by a trusted source, and they're recording the video, they're broadcasting the video. They'll send the blockchain encryption along with the video. So on the other end they'll receive that encryption and if you have the key to unlock the encryption then you'll know that you can authenticate that it's real. That it's legitimate, that it is coming from the source that is claiming to send it to you. And then you'll know that that video is legit, right? You guys did I explain that well enough? So when you do use the blockchain model, I think it would work but I just don't know how ubiquitous it could it could be in the short term. Like am I gonna be able to send anybody that I want on social media something that's been encrypted that can be verified. Or at least at least you could say this person shot this video, right?

B: Right.

J: But social media man. That's where the tires hit the pavement. That's where people are consuming most of their news, most of their information. And how are they gonna stop people from uploading deep fakes? Is Facebook and I have to have deep fake detection on the fly. Can it do it fast? Can it can it detect deep fakes fast enough to stop it before it does the damage that it's gonna do? I don't know man.

C: Also, is it not the same technology that would be used for like making memes and for like doing stuff for fun and at a certain point is that-

S: For cinema.

C: -fair? Yeah, like to block something like there's it's a context thing. Like was this used to trick people or was this like a fun, viral video that's been going around of like a watermelon dancing.

J: That's fine, but I mean, this is when the devil's in the details. You could say, yeah, use deep fake, you want to make fun of like whatever your brother you're an actor or whatever. But you can't make a deep fake of anybody that's in any government. You can't make a deep fake of anybody that has any position of power. If you do it you're breaking the law.

C: That's an obvious parody.

J: Now if it's a parody that people are misconstruing as reality then now you're blurring the lines, right?

C: That's the problem, isn't it?

S: Why can't you just have to be forced to put a label on it? Like this is a deep fake parody?

C: Right, kind of like the Onion.

B: Like a watermark. But yeah, but I think there should be harsh ramifications if you weaponize a deep fake I think you should like go to jail.

J: Right, exactly.

B: I mean you've got they gotta nail you hard and fast in due process and, but I think at least make some people think twice.

C: Right, because it's like liable but it's worse.

J: So this is one of those things as a critical thinker, as a skeptic. Keep this in somewhat in your conscious mind and you'll keep an ear out for it because it's gonna pop soon. It's gonna be one of those things. We're all gonna face soon. One day there'll be a video that people are like, oh my god. Did you see that and then we'll find out it was fake.

C: Oh, gosh.

S: Yeah, I think the bottom line is that there needs to be regulation to keep any of this technology from being used to deliberately deceive. If it's to entertain or for satire or whatever, that's fine. But if it's done to deliberately deceive then that should be illegal.

E: That's a crime.

S: Yeah, that should be a crime. Just the cohesion of our civilization depends upon getting this under control to some extent. You're actually never going to eradicate it. It's always gonna it's gonna be a part of life, it's gonna do damage, but we got to figure out ways of minimizing it to the point where it's more of a nuisance than a game changer for society. You know what I mean?

C: Yeah, it's like when the printing press first came to be like we had to come up with with libel laws.

B: I mean remember it's doing damage right now guys, I mean women are having, they're like this is deep faked on porn sites every day. They're experiencing the brunt of this before really anybody else.

C: I wonder if they have, do they have recourse?

B: I don't think yeah. No.

S: All right, let's move on.

The Neuroscience of Stuttering (32:08)

• Smithsonian Magazine: What Neuroscientists Are Discovering About Stuttering

S: So let me ask you guys a question. Not you Cara, because I know you read the article. What do you think is the cause of stuttering? If you had to guess, what, from a medical perspective what's the-

J: I think it has something to do with what you hear. There's delay in what you're-

B: Syncing up yeah, because I know that if you with people who stutter many of them experience like a dramatic attenuation of the effect if they block their hearing if they can't really hear themselves, but that's all I got.

S: So yeah, you guys are actually pretty close. So, you know historically we had no idea right? So the usual things that people said before we had any sense how the brain works like maybe it's the way they were brought up or it's a physical problem with them speaking. But as neuroscientists have explored with modern tools, what's happening in the brains of people who are stuttering they're finding that at least for, it's definitely in different people it's different. Not everybody has the exact same cause. But I think at its core it seems to be due to a sluggish communication of different parts of the brain. So the brain is not communicating with itself as robustly as is typical and speech is kind of the canary in the coal mine there in that it's the one function that really requires robust real-time communication in order to function optimally. So you won't really necessarily notice a slight delay in other things that you do but you do notice it in speech. And what parts of the brain are communicating in speech that is causing the stuttering and it is the hearing part of the brain and the language part of the brain. So it's not just this disconnect, you know in terms of synchronization between what they hear and what they're saying it's also them hearing themselves, right? And maybe but it may be more than that as well, it may be more than just hearing yourself speak. It is partly the how you process speech as well. So there's a few different things going on. One is this the robustness of interneuronal connections, right? How how much is the brain talking with itself? There also seems to be a role played in some people who stutter with dopamine that it's actually increased dopamine activity. That increased dopamine activity may actually be contributing to the decrease in neuronal connectivity.

C: Oh, okay. So it's not just in the motor speech area where they're seeing more dopamine?

S: No, no, it is more global and then also in terms of anatomically other studies have found that there is decreased astrocyte population in the corpus callosum. Now the corpus callosum is the main cable between the two hemispheres, right? So it's the main pathway by which any network across the two hemispheres will be connected. And astrocytes are the cells in the brain that are not the neurons, right? They're not the signal carriers, but they're the support cells, but they're really critical for the function of neurons. They actually could modulate neuronal function, but they also keep them functioning optimally. So having a paucity of astrocytes in the corpus callosum could correlate with a sluggish communication across hemispheres, right? Because the functioning of the connections in the corpus callosum might not be optimal because the astrocytes aren't there but to biologically optimize the functioning. The third sort of piece to the puzzle here is genetics, so there's been a number of genetic studies. There are definitely families of people who like most of the members of the family stutter. So like really strong genetic component. And then others there may be a like a weaker genetic predisposition. But scientists have discovered a number of genes, five in particular that correlate with an increased risk of stuttering. But it wasn't really immediately apparent what connection these genes have to brain function, right? They wouldn't necessarily affect anatomy. What they did all link to however are the components that of the lysosome, right? So in lysosomes are like the garbage cleaners of the cells. So they help the cells sort of get rid of bad proteins. Proteins that were made wrong or are degrading. The decreased lysosomal efficiency that could occur from one or more of these mutations can affect the function of neurons in terms of the speed of their processing, right? So again that can correlate back to the brains not talking to itself in real time. So they tested this in a mouse model where they actually could do a knockout where you breed mice that don't have the gene that you that you want to see what the gene does. So they're not making the protein and they found that yep, it definitely decreased their neuronal activity and mice apparently are quite chatty. But they mostly talk to each other and in ultrasonic frequencies that humans can't hear.

C: No way. Yeah.

S: They're chatting away and we can't hear them.

B: Oh, yeah when you hear like a baby mice squeak what you hear is the lowest frequency that it emits. All the other stuff is a way too high for us to even hear.

C: That's cool.

S: So in this one study at least the knockout mice for one of these genes linked to stuttering the mice, they were squeaking in a disjointed stuttering way. They actually started stuttering and you know the equivalent of that in mice. So, of course, it's hard to make that correlation with humans but that's how the researchers interpreted it. And then to complete this, increased dopamine activity, it might be playing a role. So there's a researcher who said well, let's give people dopamine blocking medications and see if that helps their stuttering. And in fact, we already have dopamine blocking medications. They're called antipsychotic medications. So there's been several studies using off-the-shelf antipsychotics and they do seem to work but not completely they have a modest effect.

B: They gotta rename those. Antipsychotics.

S: Well, that's the primary indication.

C: Yeah, and I mean they have some pretty severe side effects too.

S: A lot of side effects. Yeah, they have a lot of side effects. So they're trying to develop a dopamine antagonist that's anti D1 receptor, which is not an antipsychotic, but might be more specific for the stuttering with fewer side effects. So that's in development right now and it's been tested preliminarily, but needs further research to fully develop that. So yeah, that's a pretty quick summary of where we are with it and it's interesting that the core is, it's a brain problem. First of all, right? It's not socialization. It's not learning. It's not how you were brought up or anything. It's a brain problem and the brain itself is stuttering because of the different parts of the brain that have to like synchronously communicate with each other. It's being slowed down. Sometimes another part of the brain intrudes and that's the problem in some patients. Some people who have stuttering it's that there's this other part of the brain that's getting involved with the circuit and it's basically interfering with the language circuit. But in other people it's just that the primary circuit itself it's just not not fast enough to keep up in real time. And so it starts to stutter. Very interesting. So this, I think plausibly it's already led to some preliminarily effective pharmacological approaches. But they're also working on brain stimulators, to stimulate the parts of the brain that are not working as well and that's showing some promising results in preliminary studies as well. Like if you do it during speech therapy, it doesn't help them. But 80% of children who stutter outgrow it though. Their brain increases its activity over time and 20% just don't. They just don't improve and their brains don't increase their their activity. So it correlates pretty well. So hopefully in 5-10 years, I know we throw those that term around but it does seem the rate of progress has been pretty steep in recent years and I do hope is the kind of thing like in my career that we'll see some really effective treatments for it.

C: But the cool thing is obviously behavioral treatments work for some people because there are plenty of people who live normal healthy lives and who have managed to get their stutter at least under functional control just through behavioral approaches.

S: Yeah, but the question is always was it really the therapy or did they just outgrow it? Was it just regular brain development or how much of a combination is it? Like we don't know what's the percentage breakdown because again 80% of people outgrow it.

C: Right. But aren't there some people who like have a stutter all the time but then they're able to do public speaking and stuff because they utilize like CDT.

S: Yeah, so those are techniques. So there are techniques that and that allow you to compensate for the stuttering. So that's different than fixing the stuttering.

C: Isn't that kind of what Biden is like, because he has a stutter.

S: Yeah, he has a stutter.

C: Yeah, so he just has to work really hard while he's doing public speaking.

S: Yeah. I don't know how much he's outgrown it versus he's using a technique. A technique might be something, you're basically trying to prevent the interference that might be happening or you're trying to distract yourself in such a way that you're preventing that desynchronization from causing the stutter. And they work but they take a lot of effort.

C: Absolutely.

S: But you might get good at that. You might get good at it. So it takes less effort. But that's a compensated stutter versus a cured stutter, right? That's two different things. So yeah, stuttering is a phenomenon. It's not one thing. It's multiple different things and different people stutter for different reasons. But I think they're zeroing in on the core phenomenon at the root of many people who stutter and so hopefully this will inform treatments going forward to the point that will whack it back significantly.

Undead Fears (43:09)

• NatGeo: Medieval pandemics spawned fears of the undead, burials reveal

S: Alright, let's move on Cara. This is a really cool one you're gonna tell us about.

C: Yeah

S: About people who are afraid of the undead.

C: Yes, and so-

B: Not as cool as mine.

C: I don't know Bob. I think you're gonna like this one has vampires, this one has so much cool stuff. There's a study that was just published in PLOS One the Public Library of Science One, which is an open-access journal so anybody can read the full text of this, called believe between belief and fear, reinterpreting prone burials during the Middle Ages and early modern period in German-speaking Europe. Okay, so that doesn't really tell you what it's about. Except that these researchers were like, how come some people are buried face down? What does that mean, what does the literature say and why is it that we're seeing the patterns that we're seeing in the archaeological sites that we're looking at. So the lead author who is a PhD student in physical anthropology. She's studying in Germany. She was looking at a burial site and was like hey, this is weird. This body is face down. Bodies don't get buried face down. What is this about? And she decided to learn more and it uncovered this whole interesting medieval history and all of these really interesting. I don't know if we should call them hypotheses, I think that's probably still a good word for it. I don't think we're in the theory place quite yet. But all of these hypotheses about the burial sites that she and her colleagues studied. And they came up with some kind of interesting ideas. But let's talk about what what they actually found. They looked in German speaking areas in the early to late Middle Ages and so they found burial sites all over Germany Austria and Switzerland because they realized that a lot of these prone burial sites had been studied in depth in England and other parts of the UK. They also realized that the literature was rich with prone burials in Eastern Europe so in kind of like more Slavic regions. But they noticed that there wasn't a lot of good data in this Germanic area. Why do you guys think that people during the Middle Ages were buried face down from time to time?

B: They're afraid they were gonna reanimate. So if they dig down they can't hurt anybody.

C: So they wouldn't be able to dig up okay, so reanimation, revenants, vampires, things like that, but there are some other reasons that are pretty well documented. Can you think of any other ones?

E: Where the, had problems in life or were criminals or something that it was a form of punishment in the afterlife?

C: Right, like a way to kind of mark them as aberrant and then also one of the well-documented reasons that people were buried face down was for penance. And this was actually, it's all kind of based on one well-documented example which is Charlemagne's father. Pepin the Short in 768 AD who asked to be buried face down as penance for his father's sins. So this is a well-documented thing. There's a lot of provenance around that and you will find sometimes that people will be buried face down in very prominent areas of sanctified land. So in a burial ground that's at a church in a very prominent area that is usually only used for nobles or important people you will sometimes find people buried face down. And so that could be because they were paying a penance or because there was some sort of important reason to put this person facing basically what we would consider deviantly or the wrong way. There's a whole thing at the beginning of this article about the word deviant and how it usually has negative connotations. But it's really commonly used in this type of literature. It doesn't necessarily mean bad. It just means different from the norm. So these are deviant burials. Other types of deviant burials would be like facing I think East instead of West or in a North or South orientation. That's not common. Their standard burial is West East during Christian burials for some reason. Not for some reason, it's so they could see Jesus I think. Other things would be like being buried with stuff. This is kind of interesting. Super long time ago people were buried with crap all the time and then in more recent years people get buried with crap. But there was a region during the early Middle Ages where people didn't get buried with crap. Like you just didn't find stuff in their graves very commonly and they started to realize that there was a lot of variables. They looked at tons of variables in this study. So there are these great tables that you can dig in yourself where they look at every single specimen and they say was it male? Was it female? Was it you know, which what was its orientation? Was it face up or face down? Was it decapitated? Were there nails? Did it have you know tool marks? Was it wearing clothes? Was there crap in the grave with them? Were they in a shroud or a coffin? And then they did some really fancy statistics to see what kinds of things clustered together. And they realized that as the Middle Ages got from early to high then to late, so once you started to see late Middle Ages you started to see some certain things showing up like coffins whereas previously people were buried in shrouds. You started to see crap like coins and jewelry showing up on the bodies. You started to see these prone bodies also buried in the outskirts of cemeteries. And they started to realize okay, so these seem to be perhaps correlating together and also correlating with something that was happening at a very particular time in European history in the high to late Middle Ages, what would that be?

E: Black plague.

C: Yes, and not just the Black Plague, but after that there were I mean there were a lot of plagues that were going through, and they could time them right to the year. And so whether it be the Black Plague whether it be an outbreak of cholera an outbreak of syphilis. They thought well maybe these plague bodies were being buried face down and part of the reason that their jewels and things weren't taken from them it's because people were scared to touch the bodies.

E: Safety deposit box.

C: Exactly, like I don't want to go through this decaying, plague body.

E: You grab it Charlie.

C: Exactly. Because usually either the family members would take those things back or the grave diggers would steal them. That was very common. But just the people who were tasked with burying, the guys would be like I guess that was their like tip.

E: The old saying was don't die with the jewlerry on.

B: I got a new theory. And I'm gonna coin a word here potentially. Sloppy gravesmanship.

C: Right, so they actually talk about sloppy gravesmanship.

B: Wait, did they use that word?

C: No, they talked about just I think disheveled or disorganized funerary practice.

B: Yeah, like you had a shrouded body you're putting it in the big hole and he spins around like, okay, we'll leave him there or the coffin spins. I just leave it, who's gonna notice.

C: And from what I'm, there are a lot of variables here, so I'm hope that I'm not crossing any of my my threads but from what I think I remember reading in the full text was that you do tend to see more prone burials as opposed to supine face up prone burials towards outskirts and in poorer situation. So I think they take more care with burying the body anyway, when when the body is in a prime location within a Christian site, if that makes sense. Like yeah, this is an important person. We're gonna take care when we bury them. So there is a little bit of variance there that actually makes these hypotheses questionable, but the authors - if you read coverage on this, it's like the authors are saying that these were vampires. If you actually read the article they say nothing of the kind. What they say is that there's a lot of Slavic literature from around the same time when people were buried prone that there was a lot of folklore around vampirism and so there does seem to be a correlation between burying somebody face down and preventing that them from becoming a revenant. In Germanic cultures they didn't really have vampires. Their version of revenants are called Veda Ganga and so these are individuals who would come back to the world of the living to avenge something or because they're sort of in purgatory and they need to fix something before their soul could be released. And then they also have something called nachzehrer and that is a deceased person which stays in their grave and harms the living from the grave. So they will like drain vital forces from their relatives and nachzehrer actually speaks to this idea of death devourers, I think that's where the word comes from. And that they would eat their own funeral shrouds and they would also eat their own bodies.

B: They're hungry down there, right?

C: Right. So the researchers think that there's actually a pretty plausible link here between the folklore of nachzehrer burying bodies face down and plague bodies because at the height of plagues there were so many bodies piling up that they would start to decompose in place before they could properly be buried. And when bodies decompose they make noises. They make smacking. Gases get released and you think back to before we had germ theory when people thought that there was a bad air. They were getting sick from miasma or worse, this was a punishment from God and now there's a dead body and it's making smacking noises. It's eating itself, we better bury this and make sure it doesn't get us. And so that's kind of what these researchers are saying could be an explanation for an increase in prone burials in the outskirts of cemeteries in high to late medieval Germanic regions. So it's sort of like not quite a vampire thing, but it's reminiscent of vampiric stuff from earlier Serbia, Romania, Lithuania those regions speaks more to nachzehrer and Wiedenganger. And also they do talk quite a bit about the idea that there was an idea that this was sort of a curse that would happen when the first person within the household or within the village came down with the plague. Because again think back to not having germ theory of disease. Someone gets sick. Who are the next people to get sick? Their families and people they know. So if they're cursed and then all the people near them are getting cursed and then the people near them are getting cursed.

E: Oh my god. So what the family's like try to cut it off stem it where it was happening and like attack their own relatives?

C: No, I think the idea is that if somebody died first, they would be buried face down to try to stem it.

E: I see.

C: So you didn't see that all the plague victims were buried face down but that you might early on in the plague bury victims face down to try and stem that curse from making its way to the living. And that's what speaks to that nachzehrer. This idea that they're in the grave casting the stamination on living people. So if we can stem that by putting them face down their souls won't be able to leave and go wander, the Vita Ganga and also they're going to be trapped and be unable to actually kind of send their curses up because they're just gonna send them deeper into the ground. So again, a lot of this is hypothesizing but it is actually based on some decent evidence because they're comparing the anthropological record to the social cultural and the literary record.

E: Yeah, is there any written record of these kinds of things happening? It must be.

C: Right. It's just it's complicated. A lot of these burial sites from the Middle Ages are not well kept and so they went to places where the provenance was as good as it could be but a lot of times, all they have is a death record and especially during the plague. You would see mass burials or you would see sometimes that multiple bodies were buried together. Some of the times when it might be a little more obvious that this could be a fear of a revenant or a punishment for like earthly wrongs are the times when they actually would find nails in the grave. So they would be nailed down or the times when they would actually decapitate the body when-

E: I heard of the decapitation.

C: Yeah, but so I had never heard of this idea of like face down burial and then also there's some pictures of the bones so that you can see what these face down burials actually look like when they're excavated.

E: You got it Jay?

J: It's like you can't even, the word can't go by.

C: What word? The bones?

J: Look at the bones.

E: Look at the bones.

C: I don't know what that's from.

E: Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

'C: Oh shit. I know and I've seen it like ten times. How could I not? And so taking all of this evidence and trying to put it together in a sophisticated statistical way, and of course they couldn't do that. They just had to take a portion of it and make sense of it. I don't know. It's really interesting.

S: It's a fascinating window, into that time period and the belief systems.

C: And the response to pandemics, right? Like can you imagine if we had those kinds of beliefs now? Oh gosh dealing with this. I'm so glad we have modern medicine.

S: Yeah, you've been thinking about like the 1918 pandemic I just can't survive that.

C: And we were like, we were pretty good. We just weren't we hadn't really caught on to the virus thing that well, we were like stuck on it being bacterial.

S: All right. Thanks Cara.

C: Yep.

Mighty Mouse in Space (57:10)

• Portland Press Herald: Jackson Lab’s ‘mighty mice’ stayed musclebound in space

S: All right, Bob. This is kind of a follow-up item for you about muscular mice in space.

B: So yes, researchers have created mighty mice, of course, the perfect name. Mighty mice with much more muscle than usual and showed that these benefits don't go away in the microgravity of space. Potential boon for future astronauts, taikonauts, cosmonauts and other potential future nauts. Not to mention a boon for people that are experiencing the ravages of caused by muscle wasting diseases, which of course would be amazing. So this is a from a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Led by dr. Sajan Lee of the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut and co-investigator and spouse Emily Jermaine Lee. Dr. Sajan Lee discovered myostatin the myostatin gene in 1997. He was the first person to show with how the gene does what it does by regulating muscle growth. So myostatin is a protein/hormone and it's part of the the many checks and balances that keeps our bodies alive and does important things. This specific one limits muscle growth in people and many species when those brakes are removed then, technical term coming, hulking out happens. Muscle growth just gets into high gear and these these mice I believe had twice the muscle mass of regular mice, but I've seen pictures of like dogs like a whippet with this natural condition. The whippet like a steer which was so huge and diesel that it's shocking to see so much muscle on a quadruped. It was just amazing. So this effect it has been proven in experiments. It's amazing, but it's really old news. I've read about this many, probably in the late 90s and it's a thing, they can induce it. So what's new about it? And I guess the answer is mighty mice in space. So what they wanted to do is they wanted to answer the following questions. What happens to these mice in microgravity and could an inhibitor of myostatin function help even normal wild type mice retain their muscle mass in space. Now you know what microgravity does to people it's horrible. Your body is just like well, there's no stress going on here musculoskeletal wise so you're not gonna need this calcium in your bones and yeah, you don't need all your muscles so you could lose 18-20 percent of your muscle, of your lean body mass and that is horrible. So they've got a train. They've got a train every day for hours a day and and they're barely keeping pace. If you went to Mars from what I've read you cannot maintain your muscle using modern methods like this, like working out. You will lose a muscle, you will lose lean tissue and by the time you get to Mars I think you'll be very happy that the gravity was less than on earth, but if you ever came back to earth you'll be hurting. So last December 2019 they launched 40 female mice launched on the SpaceX-19 mission and returned January 7th 2020 and they had different types of mice. They had normal control mice, they had knockout mice. Steve mentioned knockout earlier this episode. So these mice lack a functional MSTN gene that makes them. these are the mighty mice and you could do that. I mean you could just breed it out and you could just knock it out and they're just born that way and that's a great way to do experiments on animals because you could see all right, let's see what happens without this gene. And then the third type of mice that they had were mice that that were given doses of a specific compound. These were regular mice. They gave him a shot of a compound known as compound V. Oh wait. No, not not compound V. It was called much less interesting AC VR to be FC. That's the compound, not compound V. That's for the Boys. So similar mice, they had a group of similar mice on on the earth. And these are the mice that drew the small mouse straws. They stayed on the ground looking up at the stars at night with tears in their eyes. Of course the mighty mice on the ground cried a little less because you know-

E: But we can't hear him because we don't hear that frequency.

B: So what do they find? So what do they find? They came back. They parachuted into the ocean and they were probably promptly slaughtered and examined and this is what they found out. The wild mice on the eye and from the ISS space station lost between 8 to 18 percent of weight in individual muscles compared to those on the earth. These are the controls, the ones on earth were fine because they weren't in microgravity. The ones on the space station for a month lost 8 to 18 percent of lean tissue and they lost up to 11 percent of bone mineral density as well. The mighty mice, so the mighty mice came back. They essentially maintain their muscles and were very similar to their counterparts on earth. That's how they put it. Very similar. Any differences I guess we're just weren't even worth mentioning. So that's amazing. You've got these mice with twice the muscle. They go into a microgravity scenario environment for 30-something days and they do not lose any muscle or bone mineralization. That's incredible. But even better than that, even better than that, the mice that were administered the compound V or the ACPR to BFC on the ISS itself they gained more lean. This is how they put it in some of the articles that I read, they gained more lean body weight, 27%, than the group on the ground, 18%. Including increased muscle mass, although they didn't gain as much muscle weight as the mice on the ground. So it's kind of a sentence. You got a slog through multiple times to kind of get a handle on what they're saying. So they gained lean tissue but they didn't gain quite as much mass as the mice on the ground that got the injection. What I love about this is that I mean this is the type of thing that you don't need to be born this way. They could I mean these are these are mice that that are normal mice they give the injection it's an inhibitor. It inhibits the gene and their muscle growth really kind of really goes doubles their muscle mass. Here in a month they gained 27%. So that's huge. That's really huge for people who could need the increased muscle mass. Say if they're bedridden or suffering from a disease. So what's gonna what can we expect in the future. Jin Lee said that we're years away but that's how everything is when you go from mouse to human studies. So of course. Just because it works in mice doesn't mean it's gonna work like this for people and a lot of times it just doesn't work it translates so poorly that it's just not even ever gonna work. So we've got a face that that is a possibility. Although I mean we've seen this effect in so many animals including humans. There are humans that are basically knockout humans where this gene is not functioning and I've seen pictures of kids that have this and they are I mean, they've got clearly they've got they're packing some decent muscle, especially for like a five-year-old. I mean you could see that like wow, that calf is pretty big. So obviously if you know me at all, this is I think this is worth every dollar the return on investment could be extraordinary. Here's a quote from Se-Jin Lee again he says the knowledge we gain about microgravity's effects on muscles and bones will help us to enhance the health of astronauts both in space and on earth and also better understand the promise that myostatin inhibitors hold for the elderly, people who are bedridden and for people experiencing muscle wasting related diseases like AIDS, ALS, cancer and so many others. So obviously this is a huge potential for these people and for this alone I think it's not not even just the astronauts, but these people that are experiencing this muscle wasting disease. It could be an extraordinary help to them.

Fake Reviews (1:05:38)

• CNBC: Amazon is filled with fake reviews and it’s getting harder to spot them

S: All right, so we we started the news segment talking about deep fakes but Evan you're gonna finish off telling us about fake reviews.

E: Yeah, fake reviewsa, specifically Amazon.

B: They piss me off.

E: Oh gosh, and they should Bob. Now have you ever shopped at the Amazon website looking for something you're unfamiliar with that you're never bought before and relied upon the Amazon reviews and ratings of that product. I have.

B: All the time man.

E: Even more so you might have used the ratings and reviews to not purchase a product. Had too many ones and two stars out of five ratings and some pretty lousy reviews.

B: If I read up even a couple bad reviews like I'm not getting even if it's only a small percentage it's just like I'm really influenced by a terrible review.

C: I always look at the bad review.

E: That's right. But you see this is where our skepticism is supposed to come into play. But it's sort of in a way defeats the purpose of Amazon. Amazon is this place where you can go and sort of quickly run through the store in a sense. It's supposed to be faster, more efficient, time-saving, all that stuff. Who has time to figure out the reviews and ratings for a dish sponge or a sun hat or in Bob's case a 12-foot tall plastic skeleton. Amazon listings these products often have hundreds or thousands of reviews instead of by comparison the handful, five or ten that you find on in the competing marketplaces for the same products. Okay, Amazon more is better, right? More reviews is better, right? Should we be trusting these reviews? Well, there's an answer to that. No.

C: Evan.

E: Yes.

C: The other day I went to buy something on Amazon and I was looking at the reviews and after the first five or six I very quickly realized that they were for a different product.

E: Ah, yeah. That's one of the things.

C: So do they like sell good reviews off old products and then refill the skeleton?

E: How about how about this Cara? Here's what they do. You'll have a product that's been on there a long time and for whatever reason it's either siscontinued or something like that. There are ways to go in there and actually either purchase. I don't know what it is the rights to it or something and then you take and then you're allowed to keep all those reviews and you can plaster that on to another product.

C: Yes, I know what these people did. It was insane.

B: How is that legal?

E: It shouldn't be but this is one of the many loopholes and flaws and problems with the Amazon system. Now Amazon claims, that they do look out for cases like this and they do correct them when they get to it. And that's sort of the overall point of all of this is that for all the efforts that Amazon makes to correct it and they do have pretty robust, people and armies and machines and algorithms and everything to help weed it out. It by the time they get to it on average the damage has already been done. You cannot keep up with the short-term tsunami of this stuff that is occurring. It's just way way too much even for Amazon one of the largest companies on the planet. But generally speaking we should not be trusting these reviews as much as we do but there's something psychological about it in which and and the whole Amazon experience sort of caters to it. I was reading and the reason I'm bringing this up is that CNBC ran a video article this past week which showcased many issues and outright fraud involved in the entire Amazon rating and review scheme. For example they undercovered they uncovered Facebook groups where unscrupulous purveyors of questionable quality products pay people to leave positive reviews of their products they incorporate bots and they have foreign click farms that upvote negative reviews to take out the competition.

C: Oh, that's messed up.

J: That is so common it's ridiculous.

C: Oh it's so sad.

E: It is sad. It is sad. And I imagine it all we've been at some point in our amazon experiences we've actually experienced this but not realizing exactly what it is that's going on here. So here's a case in point a few studies and some some other research. There was a study released this past July. Researchers from UCLA and USC analyzed more than 20 fake review related Facebook groups. These groups have an average of 16,000 members, that's average.

B: Whoa.

E: Each group would average 560 postings each day in which the sellers of these products would offer refunds or payments, outright payments for positive reviews of various products. About six bucks each but hey, jf you're in another which is now, you know by US standards not necessarily-

C: How are they making any money if they're like how much are the products they're selling?

E: Well, it comes back it comes back to quantity. How many can they get out the door in a very short amount of time before their scheme ultimately gets either discovered shut down or in some other way curtailed, but as long as they can keep it going yeah, the quantity makes up for it. There is a British online consumer website called wich wich.co.uk. Recently, they did a quick study they said in a matter of hours they were able to uncover more than 10,000 reviews from unverified purchasers on 24 items. 24 items alone. 10,000 reviews from unverified purchasers. In fact one pair of headphones being sold by an unknown brand had 439 reviews, all of them five stars, all of them unverified and all of them posted on the same day. 439 reviews. And as many as same same folks at which they're saying as many as 97% of shoppers rely on online reviews to help make their purchases. Yeah, so I mean, it's 97%, that's practically-

S: I don't. I don't even read them. I rely upon reviews from organizations, where experts review the product.

C: I only do that for expensive things. I don't that for cheap stuff.

B: Little stuff.

S: Well, but anything that I would bother researching, anything that I care about. If I care about I'm not gonna rely upon rando reviews on the website.

C: No, but the problem is you buy a lot of little things on Amazon and when you grab like, I need a new knife sharpener, right? You're like, I don't know and then you go on Amazon and you're like that one looks cheap and it's got prime shipping but so is this one which one's better? And then oh, well, this one has 3,000 reviews and it's 96% positive, that's better.

E: Another study.

C: I guess not.

E: Yep, a separate study. This is US Consumer Behavior by Northwestern University Spiegel Research Center online reviews have the power to increase purchase rates as much as 380%. So you can obviously tell they are getting returns on these investments in these fake ways of boosting their ratings and their reviews. Oh my gosh, there's and I could go on Steve.

S: So how does Amazon fix the problem though? Or is it not fixable?

E: All right, so Amazon, let's see. Let me read to you what their official statement is on this one CNBC asked them. Amazon told CNBC it uses powerful machine learning tools and skilled investigators to analyze over 10 million review submissions weekly aiming to stop abusive reviews before they are ever published. They said we have clear policies for both reviewers and selling partners that prohibit abuse of our community features and we suspend ban and take legal action against those who violate those policies and that is all true, that has that has been verified and they do it. And they continue to invest more money into it, especially now that their revenue is up so much because of COVID. I mean their revenue streams have jumped amazingly in just the last few months. But also they I think I read it was about four billion dollars that they used to shore up these systems and these people and the technology that they're using to find it out. But even still, even with all them put dousing as much water on this fire as possible on average it takes about 30 days for the fakes to be discovered and taken down which is too little too late. So they don't have enough that it's simply a matter of quantity. They said the scope is vast. How about this, five million sellers, five million sellers using Amazon and over 600 million products. It's just too much, they would have to increase it tenfold maybe to try to get it down to a point where they could keep it up on a day-to-day basis.

S: They need AI to do it.

E: Yeah, I would think so. They're gonna have to, maybe they should and who knows if they're researching that or investigating that but that's kind of the overview. That's where we are with Amazon. So caveat emptor folks I mean, please beware and do not rely solely on those Amazon reviews.

S: All right. Thanks Evan.

E: Thanks.

Who's That Noisy? (1:14:55)

• Answer to last week’s Noisy: _brief_description_perhaps_with_link_

S: Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

J: All right guys last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy]

E: Jay, that's what the dentist did to my mouth today. That's exactly what it sounded like. I had a cavity, drilled out and filled. And you can smell sort of the shaving or the carving out of the bone it has an odor to it. Yeah, that is unique, at least I think to that experience. Because I have experienced it before when I've had other cavities.

J: Well, it's a terrible feeling. It really is. I mean, could you imagine not having modern dentistry? Oh my gosh. Don't get me started on that.

E: I'd rather be buried face down in the medieval grave.

J: Anyway a listener named Daryl Gears wrote in and said I think it's the sound aboard a maglev train speeding up. Now that isn't the correct answer and I don't know what it sounds like but I would imagine it must sound something like that, right? It's got to have some type of of recognizable sound. I have to look into that and see what it is. But thank you Daryl. It's not correct. But that was a cool guess. Another listener named Jody Lesko wrote in hi Jay and crew, this week's noisy starts with something that sounds like burning or static which then turns into an orchestral sound. I'm guessing it's pipes being heated until they vibrate with pipe lengths varying in such a way that it creates a musical chord. Damn, you have an incredible imagination. That's not correct. But now I have to hear what that sounds like. Jody make it happen. Next one Michael Rops. He's been a listener for a very long time.

B: Oh, yeah.

E: Yes.

J: He said that's obviously the THX movie sound played at some on some bad speakers. So many many people wrote in and said that that's what it was. Here is a quick shortened version that I have to show you what the THX audio experience sounds like. [plays Noisy] Not completely dissimilar. We have a winner last week. Eric Confer said hi Jay and SG! SG - skeptics guide. Yeah, it's got to be skeptics guide, right? Not super group or sanctimonious geezers or-

B: I like that one.

J: Yeah, I can keep going. He said this week sound is a thousand oscillators being tuned together. I forget the youtubers name offhand, but I watch his work at times, check out the Sega oscillator he makes sometimes. That is correct. So I will go back to the original person Craig Good, who's a great friend of the show. Craig wrote in with this one. He said this guy is nuts. What he built is nuts. It's the killer drone, 1,000 oscillators that can sweep into resolution. So this thing is also called the thousand oscillator Megadrone and what was funny was Craig actually said in his email to me that people might mistake this for the THX deep note, which is what I just played. Because there is a very big similarity. And he said that the person who originally came up with that sound had it stolen from him, and he didn't get credit for it. So that THX sound there is some some interesting backstory to it. Apparently it was stolen somehow. So from Wikipedia, let me tell you what an oscillator is in case you don't know. An electronic oscillator is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic oscillating electronic signal often a sine wave or a square wave. Oscillators convert direct current DC from a power supply to an alternating current AC signal. They're widely used in many electronic devices ranging from simple clock generators to digital instruments like calculators and complex computers and peripherals, etc. So this guy took a thousand of them. Lined them all up, wired them and was able to control all of them at the same time. And they all came into a similar or exact oscillation and that's where it kind of sounds like the whole thing is getting dialed in. Let me just play that moment of resolution there real quick so you can hear it again. [plays Noisy] I mean there is something to be said about a thousand things, a thousand voices, when you get that many things making a similar noise, there is something about the chorus of that repetition, that has such, what would you call it? Gravitas. I mean, it's just an incredibly powerful experience.

C: Resonance.

J: Yes, that's a great word for it. Craig, epic, epic Noisy, thank you so much. It's one of my favorites. You got to watch the video. Look up the thousand oscillator megadrone and watch this guy completely geek out on this. It's so funny. He's like when he's building and he's like, I don't know what why am I doing it? Oh, holy Christ. I can't believe I'm doing it. He's like just so like semi blown away by the fact that he did it.

New Noisy (1:20:45)

J: Anyway, there is another noisy, there can be only one. There is a new noisy this week. It was sent in by a listener named Robert house. Here it is.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

So I want you to tell me what the deep sound is in that noisy. Because I know that there's some birds tweeting in the background, but that's not the primary sound. So if you think you know what the noisy is this week, or you heard something cool you can always email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org

== Announcements (1:21:23)

J: Steve, I have one announcement.

S: Hit it.

J: So our friends over at Skepticon which are the Australian skeptics. They are having an online conference this year, October 23rd to 25th. So their lineup includes people talking about medicine, space, reproducibility crisis, climate, human evolution, science and skepticism. Sounds like an awesome conference. Without a doubt. Dr. Carl will be there. And I just heard from Polly who is one of the organizers and she said there's going to be a TGA panel Eric Street who took the first photo of a shadow of an atom. Tanya Smith who has won awards for her work on human evolution and Neanderthal teeth. They're also announcing a climate panel on Sunday with people from the Climate Council and 2020 QLD tall poppy winner. I don't know what the tall poppy winner is, but that sounds intriguing. So there it is. You guys can go to www.Skepticon if you happen to be in that part of the world. I also think that Michael Marshall is going to be there. I saw him on the list. So he's gonna be speaking as well.

C: It's on-line, right?

J: It's online, that's correct. Yeah, you're right. You're right.

C: You have to be awake when that part of the world is awake.

J: You can be virtually anywhere and you can watch this come just like just like NECSS, you just do it. And it's good to do this guys because it shows your support for critical thinking. It helps us keep running these conferences. I know exactly how these guys feel. It's an amazing amount of work to pull it all together. So if you have the time, please do go over to skepticon.org and check it out.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:23:03)

Question #1: Panspermia Again (1:23:03)

As a long-time listener, I know that one of your favorite ongoing sagas is the ridiculous panspermia claims coming from Steele and Wickramasinghe in Australia. Well, they have done it again, this time with COVID-19. For your entertainment: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7358766/# Some amazing highlights (but there are many more):

• They were clearly writing this chapter about Candida, and then at the last minute before "publishing" (more on this below) decided that they would add some wild speculation about COVID-19 (because why not?). Some of their predictions from that time did not exactly age well (e.g. there will likely be little or no human-to-human transmission...lol).

• I absolutely love the comparisons of the geographic pattern of COVID-19 infections in China to the fallout from a giant "viral bomb." (I guess a meteorite strike? They find one that fits within the general time period of late 2019.)

• Several figures are directly taken from Australian newspapers...seems legit for a scientific publication.

• Sunspot cycles! Because why not?!

• There are a number of problematic and frankly dangerous statements in the chapter, including the statement that the exterior of masks is likely [conclusion missing].

• The whole article is an exercise in argument from ignorance ("we don't know exactly where it came from -- or at least we can find some out-of-context quotes from researchers supporting that statement -- so must be panspermia")… and also in ignoring all the genomic evidence that shows that SARS-CoV-2 clearly nestles within the phylogeny of terrestrial coronaviruses. But that's obviously giving the authors too much credit.

This also pointed me towards a way that I was not familiar with of publishing bullshit in a seemingly legitimate scientific venue that you might be interested in if not already aware. As a researcher myself (although in entomology, far from this domain), I wondered how the heck they got this published under the Elsevier umbrella and indexed by NCBI. To a member of the public who's not in the research game, this would look totally legit! I am well aware and familiar with the predatory journal game (as I get many email invites every week to publish in them), but this is a new one: these authors are using an "Online Book Series" called "Advances in Genetics" that has multiple volumes that appear to have different editorial teams. Some appear to be legitimate (the series is indexed and has a not-bad-but-not-great impact factor) while others (this one, I assume, although this volume is still in press so I can't see who the editors are) have guest editors that are likely sympathetic to the bullshit and can send the chapters to known friendly reviewers.

And check out who the guest editors are for the latest volume, 106!: https://www.elsevier.com/books/book-series/advances-in-genetics I wonder how critical they were of their own chapters? Because this chapter, although entertaining, has COVID-19-related statements that are frankly dangerous to have in the scientific literature, I think it'd be reasonable to push for retractions. The series editor appears to be a legit researcher (but I didn't dig deep; I'm sure he could have his blind spots (https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=dD8c7g8AAAAJ&hl=en). I wonder if he's aware of this.

As a very last aside, it's a funny coincidence that the first part of the chapter advances a bullshit panspermia "hypothesis" for the origin of Candida auris to explain how it suddenly popped up in multiple locations without clear evidence of human-mediated spread among those locations. Just this week, NPR's radiolab summarized the case for an alternative (and seemingly much more legitimate) hypothesis that selection for higher temperature tolerance is responsible for the recent emergence of C. auris. Seems preliminary, but better than panspermia. https://mbio.asm.org/content/10/4/e01397-19/article-info Anyway, I'd love to hear you talk about the new panspermia BS, if only because I need a laugh these days. And if you ever want to spread the gospel of or have questions about the wild and crazy world of parasitoid wasps (I know, I keep emailing you about this), I'm always here Keep up the good work, folks.

– Paul Abram Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada

S: Alright, we're gonna do one quick email. This comes from Paul Abram from Chilliwack, British Columbia.

E: It's a place?

C: Yes. I know Chilliwack. My friend Carin Bondar who a lot of people listening might know. She wrote I think Wild Sex, she's like a cool biologist who writes a lot about sex in the animal kingdom. She lives in Chilliwack.

S: Chilliwack. So anyway, he writes as a longtime listener, I know that one of your favorite ongoing sagas are the ridiculous panspermia claims coming from Steel and Wickramasinghe in Australia. Well, they have done it again, this time with COVID-19, and then he gives us a link. He goes into the study, but I can't read is very very long email. I'm just gonna give you the highlights here. So this is a yeah, this is an absurd article. The article is origin of new emergent coronavirus and candida fungal diseases terrestrial or cosmic?

C: They lumped together coronavirus with with candida?

S: Yeah, so Paul I think correctly observes that this article is probably originally about candida and they just tacked on coronavirus because it's like that's going to get them headlines and get them in the news.

C: This things has nothing to do with each other.

S: Yeah, but then what they did was I mean they obviously wrote the article with that in mind though, so the idea is that these two infections, these two pandemics he came from space, right? That's like how could how could a virus crop up out of nowhere and suddenly spread all around the world, you know.

B: Inconceivable.

S: It's inconceivable. How could candida aureus, a specific species come out of nowhere and then pop up in several different places of the world at the same time. And we're not sure how it got from point A to point B. So the whole hypothesis is absurd on many levels. First of all, it's not a mystery where coronavirus the SARS-CoV-2 came from, nor how it spread. It's not a mystery at all. And same thing with candida, this is a fungal infection infection. And they're trying to argue that because these new strains crop up that the most plausible theory is that they fell from cosmic sources, from panspermia. Fell from the sky, from space-

C: No, they they spill over from animals.

S: -not that they evolved. Yeah, I know.

C: We already know that.

S: The other thing is how could SARS-CoV-2 come from space when it's so closely related to SARS-CoV-1. Do they think that all? I think they think that all viruses came from space. Yeah, so I mean it's just absurd on its face. They don't have any even reasonable argument. It's all just pure nonsense.

E: What's the angle? Are they just trying to be contrarians?

S: They're just promoting their pet theory of panspermia, that life comes from space.

C: But it's literally like one of these like it's like and then a miracle happens. Like, I can't explain it? Must have come from space.

S: It's worse because you can explain it. They're creating a fake mystery and then proposing an absurd solution to their non mystery.

B: Maybe they're reading a little bit too much of Scott Sigler's Infected series because that's exactly what happens. This virus comes from space, but it's created specifically to infect people. So they don't even include that obvious thing that you would need to have a virus come from space.

E: Well, maybe they're building up to that Bob. Stay tuned.

S: All right, that's enough about that. Guys, let's go on with science or fiction

Science or Fiction (1:29:53)

Answer	Item
Fiction	As tractable as dogs
Science	Gone from british isles
Science	6 n.a. attacks in 100y

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Jay	As tractable as dogs
Bob	As tractable as dogs
Evan	As tractable as dogs
Cara	As tractable as dogs

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Theme: Wolves
Item #1: Wolves were completely eradicated from the British Isles by about 1760.
Item #2: Wolves raised and socialized by humans from young pups are as 'tractable' as domestic dogs.
Item #3: In North America there have been only six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans in the last century, none of which were fatal.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics tell me which one is the fake. So as is typical when we record early, especially since yesterday was a holiday-

B: You've got a theme.

S: We've got a theme. And we're recording a day early because Jay forgot that tomorrow is his daughter's birthday.

C: You're so mean.

J: How many times am I gonna be accused of this? First of all, my daughter is born on 9 9. There's no way to forget that date. That's number one. Number two, I thought that we were gonna be having dinner and a quick birthday cake for my daughter and then I would go upstairs and record the show as normal, right? Because it's in the middle of the week, you're not gonna have a big party. And Sunday we're taking her horseback riding for her birthday. You know I'm saying? That's the big day. But of course because my wife is such an unbelievable planner she has decided to have a party on Wednesday tomorrow and Sunday. So it ended up being yes, I was busy. I should have known Steve, but I didn't.

E: It's like a birth week more than a birthday.

S: Thanks for spreading that out. So yeah, you basically didn't confirm. Okay, so, which means if all of this means that I had to come with a theme for this week's science official because there was not enough news items. The theme is quite completely randomly wolves. You guys know a lot about wolves? Okay, here we go three random facts about wolves. Item one, wolves were completely eradicated from the British Isles by about 1760. Item number two, wolves raised and socialized by humans from young pups are as tractable as domestic dogs. Tractable as in quotes, by tractable scientists mean that they're as controllable, trainable. And item number three, in North America there have been only six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans in the last century, none of which were fatal. All right, Jay. You're gonna go first. Go, you go first.

Jay's Response

J: Wolves were completely eradicated from the British Isles by about 1760, so I mean what? There's no wolves over there? Or they were, maybe they were repopulated. That's a pretty serious claim right there. I got to think on that a little bit. Wolves raised and socialized by humans from young pups are as tractable as domestic dogs. And finally in North America there have been only six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans in the last century, none of which were fatal. Okay, I'm gonna write it right out of the gate, I think the second one here that wolves raised and socialized by humans from young pups, they is no way that they're even close to being as domestic as dogs. As long as I understand the definition of that word, I don't believe that they even come close to what a domesticated dog is. So that's the fake.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Yeah, to me that one just leaps out and smacks me in the face. I'll say that's fiction, too.

S: All right, pretty confident. Evan?

Evan's Response

E: Now about wolves being completely eradicated from the British Isles in 1760. I have two things to say about that. Okay, so if that's the case then there was the Pied Piper or something let all the wolves out of Britain or something along those lines. And secondly, that means the American werewolf in London story is a fiction and I have a hard time believing that. Jumping to number three, the only six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans, that seems really low, awfully low number, especially for a vicious wolf, none of which fatal. That one's probably true. That one leaves for the same reasons that Jay and Bob brought up tractable as domestic dogs. Wouldn't we see more families with wolves in their households? And I don't know of many of those and I think you would see a higher prominence of that if that were the case. So therefore that's the fiction.

S: And Cara.

Cara's Response

C: I think I agree with the British Isles. I know there were wolves at some point, but it was a really long time ago. Six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans in the last century. None of which were fatal. That one I guess the unprovoked qualifier is what makes that one probably science. Like if somebody was kind of asking for it, then maybe a wolf attacked them because they were taunting it or something like that or holding up food, getting too close to their pups. Although that doesn't account for any rabies attacks, which is interesting or maybe they've they've only been non-fatal. I don't know. Also, there just aren't that many wolves, I mean in certain regions there are a lot of wolves, but they've kind of sadly been pushed out of a lot of more populated areas. Yeah, I think I have to agree with the guys that although you probably can get some kind of cuteness out of puppy wolves, as they get older I bet you they are like hard to tame and they don't listen to people as well. And they probably are like more aggressive than domestic dogs. So I bet you they're just certain things that we needed those thousands of years of evolution for that they just don't have readily. You can't do in one generation. So I'm gonna say, I'm gonna GWTGs.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Okay. Go with the guys. All right. Well, we'll take these in order then. Number one, wolves were completely eradicated from the British Isles by about 1760. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This one is science. So yeah, they were common in Great Britain, hence all of the fairy tales and stuff about them, but they were deliberately eradicated. They were they were hunted down, wiped out. They were thought of as pests. They served no useful function. They were just predators, they prey upon livestock, kill people and so multiple laws passed to hunt them down. They were bounties put on them, etc, and they were hunted to extinction. Now, obviously, we're not a hundred percent sure about the date. But that's the last known wolf kill in 1760. There were unconfirmed reports of wolf sightings after that date, but they're unconfirmed and who knows. So that's why I say about, I'm not sure if that's literally the last wolf anywhere, but that's the last confirmed wolf kill was in 1760. They haven't been any wild wolves in Great Britain since.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Okay, let's go to number two. Wolves raised by and socialized by humans from young pups are as tractable as domestic dogs. You guys all think this one is the fiction and by young pups, they mean that they have to be raised from before they can open their eyes. And they have to be intensely socialized by people. But even then they don't get nearly as tractable as dogs. This is the fiction. So actually but they're more attractable than you might think. I mean they can sort of exist in a family and they can be trained to be pretty controllable and tamed. Again, they're not domesticated, but they're tame.

C: They could be like outside dogs.

S: But for example if you play fetch with them, they're less likely to relinquish the item than the real dog. They're more likely to get growly and defensive over any resource. Like if you get near their food, they're growl at you.

J: Sure.

S: They're more likely to get bitey when you brush them. So yeah, so they could be pretty good actually, I mean, wolves and dogs are not that far apart evolutionarily speaking, but yeah, the domestication did have a clear effect.

E: Yeah, what would be the advantage to having a wolf as opposed to a dog? I can't see one.

C: I don't know. I get maybe if you live in a region where I don't know historically, it might just happen with certain families who like maybe Inuit families or somebody who lives a very far north.

S: So when you think about it, though, the fact that you can hand raise a wolf and they could reasonably function in a human society shows you how plausible that was early on, before wolves were domesticated at all they could have coexisted with humans even in their wild state.

C: I learned something super cool when I interviewed this guy who wrote about the Russian Fox experiment. Dogs follow human fingers like we can point and a dog will look where we're pointing. Yeah, dogs are amazing that they can do that. When the foxes predomestication couldn't do that. Like no wild fox can do that. But post domestication they could. And I think there's some evidence that wolves although they're really bad at it, there's some evidence that they have been able to do that or at least to follow humans gaze periodically. And so it's like they have these precursors that are almost necessary for domestication that are already there. It's like they're just one step closer than foxes which require a lot more work to domesticate. Which is why we probably have dogs or wolves. Dogs aren't foxes.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All this means that in North America there have been only six reported unprovoked wolf attacks against humans in the last century none of which were fatal is science. This isn't just because wolf populations are reduced in North America. There are wild wolf populations thriving in different locations in North America. They were hunted here too, but we didn't wipe them out before more enlightened age turn switch them from being hunted to being protected. But the thing is that the the concept of wolves as sort of vicious predators is not really accurate. They generally tend to leave people alone. They don't go out of their way to hunt down people. So there were only six cases where wolf attacked a person and none of those cases were fatal. Over the same period of time 21 cases of wolves attacking humans, but they were provoked mainly by people feeding them. So they counted that as provoked. Yes, you shouldn't try to feed a wild wolf.

C: It seems like pretty good advice.

S: Yeah, and only one of those cases was fatal. The rest were not fatal, but it's not clear. That's a controversial case because they basically just saw wolf eating a person and they did they didn't know if he was scavenging or he had killed the person. They weren't able to definitively tell if the wolf killed him. So it's one possible fatality, the rest were non-fatal. Yeah, so, also the all of the concerns about wolves like they prey on livestock? Very little. It's insignificant compared to other losses, natural losses of livestock. So there's no reason to eradicate wolves because you fear for your lifestyle. Obviously, any farmer that loses an animal to a wolf is going to take it very seriously, but statistically speaking it's like less than a percent a loss compared to 70 or 80 percent of the losses that occur being due to things like disease or injury or whatnot. So it really is insignificant. So actually they're generally speaking friendly sociable animals. They're not really the vicious killers that fairy tales portray them to be.

J: After all my reading throughout the years I never actually had read a negative account about wolves like where I was like, oh man, they're really dangerous, like I've come to be not afraid of them. I've seen them a few times in my life and if anything I'm like, I think they're beautiful and they're really just really wonderful to look at and they're not intimidating.

C: And I wonder how much of that is from European folklore, influence from European encounters because I feel like the American experience of the wolf is much more influenced by like Native American mythology and wolves being these really majestic creatures.

S: Yeah, possibly because here's the question how many half wolf, half dog animals do you think are pets in North America.

C: Probably illegally, but-

S: No. How many?

E: Five thousand?

S: A hundred thousand. A hundred thousand half wolf pets. And they're fine.

C: Yeah, cuz it's the same species. Yeah, it's just a different like subspecies I guess you would call it.

S: I actually really love wolves. I think they're gorgeous animals. I've never seen one in the wild.

C: I haven't either.

S: Seen a black bear in the wild.

C: I see coyotes all the time.

S: I've seen coyotes. I've seen foxes. Bob, you've seen a bobcat, right?

B: Twice.

C: That's cool.

J: I saw a mountain lion.

C: You did? You saw a wild mountain lion?

J: Yeah, I go to Colorado quite a bit.

S: Oh, we've seen them like driving in Florida.

B: They can drive?

S: No, I mean while we're driving like on the road, you'll see them it on the side of the road or whatever.

C: That's cool. I've never seen one here in LA. I mean we have a lot but I've never seen one.

J: Do you ever see a moose? They're huge and they will kill you.

C: Do you know what I saw in Africa a ton of? Jackals and I don't know if you guys remember but prior to us talking about the jackal on this show I had no idea what one was. Remember that was one of those weird gaps in my knowledge.

S: You never saw the Omen?

C: No, I guess not.

E: Never saw the jackal?

C: No, I didn't see that either.

S: The Antichrist apparently will be born of a jackal.

C: Oh, I love jackals.

E: Why are they pairing up jackals with Antichrist?

C: They have this weird cackly howl which I think is beautiful, but it sounds pretty evil.

J: I've heard more evil. I've been married to more evil.

E: Oh, we're going there?

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:42:01)

I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius, and we’re skeptical.
– attributed to Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), English writer, inventor, futurist, undersea explorer, and television series host.

S: Ok, Evan, give us a quote.

E: All right. "I don't believe in astrology. I'm a Sagittarius and we're skeptical." That quote is attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, all right, so, when I saw this quote first of all, I checked to see if we had used it before we hadn't. Then I was reading it and I'm checking it out on websites and stuff making sure it's okay. Because this is the kind of thing that anybody could have said and throw Arthur C. Clarke's name on it. So I came across a website called quote investigator. This is a handy website. They trace quotes. They do the legwork basically for everyone. What's this quote really attributed correctly. In this case tt appears yes, to the best of their knowledge. Yes. They hunted it down from an April 1997 issue of the UK magazine astronomy now. There was a letter from a reader who basically said, talked about an interaction he had with Arthur C Clarke he said this is a point that all of us would do well to bear in mind as perhaps it is that made by Arthur's Clarke when he told me I don't believe in astrology, I'm a Sagittarian and we're skeptical. Which apparently is a take on a phrase that has been bantered about since kind of like the 1970s. There are earlier other versions of that quote said by other people. For example in March of 1978 they said they have a guy on a comic strip, there was a comic strip called Frank and Ernest and in that comic strip one of the characters says I don't believe in astrology, we're Scorpios, we're too scientific for that sort of thing. So they went into the research to find all the iterations of this but the actual Arthur C Clarke statement appears legitimate to have come from that source. So that was fun.

S: But I've heard many many people steal that, including myself.

E: There you go, why shouldn't you.

S: It's funny.

C: But are you a Sagittarius?

S: No, I'm a Leo. So I say, if somebody says anything about astrology I go, I'm a Leo and Leos don't believe in astrology.

E: Right, works with anything.

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

J: You got it man.

E: Thanks Steve, see you on Friday.

C: Thanks Steve.

S: Yep, we'll see you all on the Friday live stream.

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.

Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary