SGU Episode 1002
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| SGU Episode 1002 |
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| September 21st 2024 |
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"Embracing sustainability with sleek solar panels on a modern home." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things." |
Thomas Carlyle |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 18th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone. What, someone's missing?
S: Bob is in Italy right now. I think at this moment he's in Florence.
C: Bob doesn't miss the show very often, does he?
S: No, not often.
C: Yeah, because that felt weird you saying my name first.
S: Yeah, but he does get a vacation every now and then.
C: Yeah, yeah.
E: Florence is just wonderful. The entire Tuscany region.
S: Jay, you've been to Florence, right?
J: Steve, you know damn well that Florence is my favorite place on the planet.
S: Is it?
J: Favourite city, favorite place on the planet, yes.
S: They have the best bread, right?
J: No, they don't have the best bread. Unbelievably, they have very, very, it's not my kind of bread. It's flavourless bread. It came to be because at some point they decided that they're not going to use salt in the bread making because bread is intended to be used for dipping and for sauces and things like that. Which it works fine. I still think that flavourful bread tastes really good when you use it with sauces. But yeah, it's a cultural thing, though. But every single thing else I love.
C: Your favorite place on the planet has shit bread.
J: It's not good. It's just not good. Did you guys know that Florence is is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance?
E: Oh, yes.
J: Which is kind of ridiculous.
C: A big moment of the Renaissance. If we can pinpoint a place.
J: You know, for anybody who's into history, the Medici had a huge influence in Florence, and the last home of that family still stands, and they turned it into a museum, and it is an incredible place to visit.
S: So guys, there's been an update on the Titan disaster. You remember that the sub that was taking people down to the Titanic that just imploded?
E: The one they controlled with a Nintendo remote controller?
S: Yeah, so they're still investigating that. The update is, so the question was, were the people in the sub aware that they were in trouble, or was the implosion instantaneous and they died without ever having the slightest clue that they were in danger?
C: Tell me this is good news.
J: Oh, I thought we knew that it was sudden death.
S: Well, no. There was, in fact, the possibility that they knew that they were in trouble. And this comes from the fact that, so this submarine has weight that on the bottom, right? It carries weights.
E: Ballast.
S: Drag it down to the bottom, and then when they get to the bottom, they drop enough weight so that they're neutral buoyancy, so they could then navigate around the bottom. And then when they want to come back up, they drop more weight, so then they become lighter than water, and then they float back up to the surface. So they dropped their weights right before they imploded, or some of their weights, right? So the question was, well, maybe they knew they were in trouble, and therefore they dropped their weights and were trying to make an emergency ascension, and that's when they imploded, which means that their last moments were probably panic-filled. And this fact apparently is important for the lawsuits, right? Because if they were suffering and panicking at the end, that adds to the damages. But a more recent analysis, this is now one of the updates, shows some people now say that, well, they only dropped enough weight to maintain neutral buoyancy and so they probably were doing that so that they could navigate near the bottom.
E: Okay, so they were just—
S: And they were not trying to ascend.
C: So it's just a fluke.
E: Going along as if everything was fine.
S: Yeah, so they dropped two weights totaling 70 pounds when they have a total of 200 to 300 pounds of ballast. And so that's not a panic, we gotta ascend move. That was just, okay, we can go to neutral buoyancy so we can navigate a round move. So we're back to the, they probably didn't know anything was going to happen and the implosion was sudden.
C: But I want that to be my reality from now on.
S: Well, that would be better because that would have been very unpleasant final moments if they knew that they were doomed.
J: Well, very risky thing to do. You know, I mean, they had to get in that thing knowing that there was some danger involved.
E: Well, sure, but at the same time...
C: Nobody wants this to happen.
E: Part of you suspends that understanding that there's a component of potential death here, and that's true of a lot of things. I mean, we don't think about it every time we step onto an airplane, we'd lose our mind.
J: I do.
S: I mean, it's one thing to say they knew the risks, they knew it was risky, but they were probably all planning on surviving that adventure.
C: Of course.
S: And they didn't, yeah.
E: I have a question about ascension. So if they had to do an emergency ascension and they rose too rapidly, would they all have the bends?
S: No, because they're not breathing compressed air in the sub.
E: Oh, it's just plain old air?
S: Well, I think it's still just one atmosphere inside the sub.
E: I see.
S: Right? Or maybe a little bit more. But when you're breathing out of a air tank, you're diving, that air is under the pressure that wherever you are, depending on your depth. The bends happen because you're breathing nitrogen and oxygen. Because you're under pressure, the nitrogen dissolves in your blood. And then if you rise too quickly, the nitrogen comes out of solution, and you get bubbles of nitrogen in your blood, which can block blood flow, and that's what gives you the bends. So you have to do it slowly, slowly, so that the nitrogen slowly comes out of the blood and doesn't cause bubbles. All right, well, let's move on with the news items.
Quickie with Steve: Earth’s Minimoon (06:13)[edit]
S: Going to start with a quickie. So did you guys know that the Earth is about to get a new moon?
J: No.
E: Oh, are we replacing the old one?
S: No, an additional moon, not a replacement moon.
J: Is this a good thing?
E: A companion.
C: What do you mean by about to?
S: Well, there is a small asteroid about 10 meters wide that on September 29th is going to go into orbit around the Earth.
J: How big is it?
C: It is about to happen.
S: 10 meters, as I just said.
C: Very small moon.
E: Okay, now does 10 meters constitute a moon?
S: So it's going to be what they call a mini moon. It's a moon in that it will be orbiting the Earth.
C: But satellites orbit the Earth.
S: It's not artificial. It's an object.
C: I would still call this a satellite. The moon is also a satellite.
S: The moon is also a satellite. They're calling it a mini-moon. Now, it will be the Earth's companion for a grand total of 56.6 days. It will complete one full orbit around the Earth in that time. And then it will break free of the Earth's gravity and continue its orbit around the sun. So it's basically in a near Earth, it's an asteroid in a near Earth orbit. We are temporarily going to capture it for 56.6 days, about two months. It'll be our mini moon and then it'll break free and go around the sun.
J: Are we going to name it?
C: Of course we're going to name it.
S: It has a name.
E: Our moon doesn't even have a name.
S: The name of the moon is Moon. It's 2024 PT5. It's more of its designation than an actual name.
E: Oh my gosh. Let's give it a social security number.
J: I know, right? I mean, why do they do that? Like, come on.
S: Everything gets a designation number. It only gets a name if they think it's worth it.
E: Like some sort of Greek legend myth.
C: Because that would get so confusing so fast when you have thousands of objects you're cataloguing.
S: You reserve actual names for things that are more profound.
C: And they still have a designation. It's like us. We all have a social security number and a name.
E: Well, that's true. But I don't know, things like this are good for contests. The fourth grade class of whatever elementary school named this one, and then some other group in Finland or something can name the next one. That'd be cool. Let them name it.
S: But this happens all the time. Actually, this is not like a unique happening. In 2020, astronomers identified a 3.5-meter asteroid that was in orbit around the Earth for probably around three years, but it broke off and drifted away after that. So the thing is, the Earth is very close to the Sun, right? So Venus and Mercury are too close to the Sun to have moons. That's why they don't have any moons. The Sun's gravity would steal any moons from them. The Earth is kind of right at the edge, so we can have a moon. We're outside that limit. But we're pretty close to the Sun, so our grasp on moons is fairly tenuous. In fact, if you map out the orbit of the Moon, the Moon's actually always going around the Sun, if you know what I mean. It's always sort of concave toward the Sun. It's never going around the Earth, away from the Sun, if that makes sense.
C: Is the sun ever going to steal our moon?
S: No, it would have already if it was going to. But that's why these transitory mini moon satellites, we only have them temporarily and then they will drift away out and just orbit the sun directly. So that's what's going to happen.
E: Maybe we'll call them moonlets.
S: Moonlets? I'm okay with moonlets. That's all right.
C: I like moonlet.
E: Moonlings.
J: Moonlings. My God.
News Item #1 - Dead Internet Theory (10:08)[edit]
S: All right, Cara, tell us about the dead internet theory. What's that?
C: Okay, so I just heard about this today when I read an article about this today, but I'm curious. Have any of you heard of the dead internet conspiracy?
E: I'm, not.
J: Wait, I think is this the thing where there's going to be like more dead people?
S: No. I heard about it recently as well, but just but just fairly recently.
C: Yeah. I mean, this has been I think this was first proposed in 2021. Actually, the first kind of finding of this theory on the Internet, according to The author of this life science article, Roland Moore Collier, was on the Agora Rhodes Macintosh Cafe Forum in 2021, when somebody screen named Illuminati Pirate started a thread. And that thread was called Dead Internet Theory. Most of the internet is fake. I mean, and this is like everywhere. It's got a full Wikipedia page. There's a lot of chatter on this on there was at least on places like 4chan. You see talk about it on Reddit. So the idea here is that the internet now consists and actually has since 2016 or 2017, that's what that's the official quote, death, that the internet now consists mainly of bots. And it's just bots talking to bots. It's all bot activity. It's all content that was generated by AI, that was manipulated by algorithmic curation, and sort of organic human activity on the internet is now the minority. Does that make sense? Some people take this theory further because what's a good conspiracy theory if it doesn't have like layers of batshit? And so some people claim that Government agencies are actually using these bots to manipulate public perception across the board. That's all that's happening. Everything we see online is just the man pulling the strings.
E: So it's a Truman Show kind of thing? It's part of the production of the Truman Show?
C: Yeah, it's 1984. It's it's... Yeah, I stumbled across this Live Science article about the dead internet theory and sort of looking at it now versus 2021. Is this first of all, pure pseudoscience is the dead internet theory and conspiracy theory that is baloney. Is there some truth to it? And should we be worried, I guess, is a good question to ask. So yeah, let's start there. What do you guys think? How much of the internet is bots?
E: I mean, is there a number or-
C: There are some numbers, plural.
J: Can we get clarification?
C: Yeah, it's a pretty vague conspiracy theory. But yes, I will try to clarify what questions do you have?
J: I mean, like visiting a website, this has nothing to do with that. Like you're talking about like when we're on social media?
C: No, it has to do with that too. It has to do with the fact that most of the content on the internet was made by bots or AI agents. And then, of course, that leads us to the second part of the conspiracy theory, which is that most of the entities engaging with that content are also bots or AI agents.
E: But wouldn't they, wouldn't the people or whomever's behind that intent, realize that they're building something in which it's just talking to itself mostly, and why? Why would they go through that effort?
C: Advertising revenue.
E: To manipulate ad numbers.
C: Yep. And clicks and engagement.
E: Yeah. Look, I mean, when in doubt, follow the money. I understand that that sometimes leads you to correct conclusions, but purely advertising?
C: I didn't say purely. Some people think it's because the government is trying to just change the way that we think about things. They're trying to influence decision making and, and elections and things of that nature. Jay, did that clarify or?
J: Yeah, I get it. I mean, the idea. The idea here is that there's just an amazing amount of non human activity on the web.
C: Yeah, and the conspiracy theory, by definition, is that most of the activity on the web is not human. And that's why they call it the dead internet and the internet died, according to the conspiracy theory around 2016-2017.
J: So did they figure out, Cara, like how much of that is true?
C: So in this article, the author of the article is like, spoiler alert, don't worry. Like we are not in a dead internet. Like there are lots of people doing lots of cool stuff on the internet and some kind of awful stuff and some not so good stuff.
E: Oh, yeah.
C: But he does cite a number of statistics, because this is a big question. The internet? Like, that's a lot. What are we talking about? We talk about the whole-
E: How do you measure that? How do you quantify it?
C: But so there are a few different ways to look at this. So there's an internet security, a cybersecurity company called Imperva that recently put out a study and they're saying that according to their research, bots account for about half of internet traffic and that that traffic tends to be bots that are used to generate fake advertising revenue. So just bots going around, clicking on pages, right? And every time there's a click, that's a fraction of a cent that goes towards, towards that page. There's also a study that was published in June of this year that reported that 57.1% of all sentences on the web are machine-generated translations, which is pretty interesting.
E: Foreign languages?
C: Probably, yep, because there are a lot of countries and a lot of languages out there. Originality.ai, they have an ongoing study, and they're saying that as of right now, the number of websites that are found to be hosting AI generated content is around 13.1%. Taking that as it is, that doesn't necessarily mean the internet is dead. It feels death-like in some ways, but we have to remember that if most content on the internet right now was generated by AI tools, Google's Gemini, ChatGPT, different image creation tools, video creation tools, we all know what that content looks like right now, right? Like, it's getting better, but we know what it looks like right now. You would notice somebody that you were following on Instagram had sometimes three arms or like a really creepy extended smile. Maybe. And that's the question, right? Are we at a really interesting tipping point because there is some evidence to show that there are accounts across social media that are fully digital accounts of images of people that don't exist doing things that they never did. There is an example in this article of a recent, let me see if I can find it, yeah, just published in a bunch of different outlets this August that Coinbase, so it's very first crypto transaction between two different AI agents. So AI is trading crypto with each other.
S: That's not surprising.
C: Yeah.
E: Yeah, but why?
S: I mean, it's still on behalf of a person who who's controlling the AI.
C: Yeah, I don't know if this is a can do or, or can do by manipulating or a did do without manipulation situation.
S: But meaning that, like, the AI doesn't have money. It's not a legal entity.
E: Right.
S: And that money's got to belong, that crypto's got to belong to somebody, even though the AI's out there doing their transaction.
E: OK, so it's just acting as a tool for the transaction, which is owned by somebody else or some entity.
C: Yeah, let's help the AI agents get work done and participate in this economy. Yeah, payment platform that allows AI agents to spend money autonomously.
S: So I don't like the term dead internet because it's, again, it doesn't mean that there aren't people on the internet doing stuff. And in fact, it doesn't really matter how many bots are doing stuff as long as they're doing their own thing. Even if at some point in the future human activity is 0.1% of internet activity and the other 99.9% is bots.
C: It's still billions of people.
S: We're still doing all the stuff that we're doing on the internet. There's a lot of other AI stuff happening in the background.
C: But the problem is it's not in the background.
S: Well, that's the thing. Are they pretending to be people? Is it distorting? Are you interacting with a bot when you think you're interacting with a person? Is it distorting comments and distorting wahtever. And that's different.
C: And that's the fear and that's what we're seeing. The different examples that are cited are often AI-generated images going viral and people not being able to tell the difference between a real image and an AI-generated image. Stories being written by ChatGPT that are then published as if they were stories that were researched and written by human beings. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. And then on the flip side of that, comments on those stories, on those images, likes, shares, responses happening by bots that look like people. And we know that that can elevate.
E: Amazon reviews.
C: Amazon reviews is a great example. Or certain things being shared in such a way that they go viral so they're more likely to show up in the algorithm on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. That share kind of architecture is not actually by people. It's by bots. And of course, we have real examples of this when it comes to Russian election interference. These things have been researched and we have good evidence to show that it does happen. So my takeaway when reading about this is do not fear that's not where we are right now. The internet is not dead. It is not a graveyard. It's not all bots. But also, there is some disconcerting evidence about our inability as human beings to differentiate between, let's say, the outcomes of human activity and the outcomes of bot activity. And the gray area in between. Because I think the very same mechanisms that underlie an interest in utilizing bots, we as people have been optimizing for years. SEO matters, right? And you might see a news organization choosing a certain headline or choosing a certain spin in order to get clicks. And that same kind of degradation of journalism is the same fear, I think, that we have with bots. It's just bots, maybe, or AI, more efficient, more effective. They may be able to do it faster, better, eventually. And so that murky gray area in between, the ethic of all of this, I think, is an interesting question to grapple with because it applies to people and bots.
S: Yeah, and the internet may just be the first venue in which that's the case, in which we're basically thrown in with the mix with a bunch of AIs, to the point where you can't tell the difference.
E: Yeah, at what point does this become pure deception?
S: But that, well, it already is deception, right?
C: Like misinform, intentional misinformation or unintentional misinformation.
S: Did you read anything, Cara, about suggestions as to what can be done about it or how feasible it is to police this?
C: Well, some things are being done, which is good. So when we look at these Internet giants like Google, for example, they have the leading search engine on the Internet. They penalize articles that try to game their algorithm. Well, what Google is doing is kind of changing their algorithm so that certain things make you more likely to rise to the top, like pictures of people using the product or like other clear ways to prove that it was a human being engaging with it.
E: Yeah, because for the moment, that's harder to fake people for the moment.
C: Yeah, but I do think that on the on the flip side of that there is and maybe it's generational, or maybe this is anecdotal, but I think about my engagement, let's say with a chat function on a website of somebody I have to engage with and don't want to or a telephone call to my insurance company or whatever. And I'm always super skeptical. I'm always like, you're not a real person. And I'm always trying to break the system and ask them weird questions and see how they respond because I never trust that I'm talking to a real person. How do you guys feel about that, like when you have to use a chat function on a website?
J: Well, they suck. You know, most of them are horrible.
C: Right.
J: But I know what's coming, and I know that it's going to be, they're going to be much smarter, and it's probably going to get a lot more personalized.
S: Yeah, I mean, if it gets the job done, I don't care.
C: Yeah, at that point, I don't care.
E: Right, I just want the piece of information that I can't find in their FAQ or or whatever else they got.
C: Yeah, at that point, I don't care. But the problem is, I want to know that they can solve my problem, and very often, If I am trying to reach out to a person to solve my problem, it's a problem that can't be trouble-shooted by an FAQ. Shut up.
S: Yeah, you're right, Cara. At that point, you probably need to talk to an actual person.
C: Yeah, that's why I'm always just pressing zero incessantly when I call these different lines, like, give me an agent, speak to an agent, speak to an agent, speak to a representative.
E: Please, representative help. Zero.
C: So this one's interesting to me. I don't know, something we should keep following maybe five to ten years.
S: Yeah. It will be an interesting thing to follow. Absolutely.
E: Ten years? Oh my gosh.
S: All right.
News Item #2 - Classroom CRISPR (24:51)[edit]
S: Jay, tell me about Classroom CRISPR. What is this?
J: Yeah, when I first read this, I was a little worried.
E: Like eight-year-old kids, hey, let's chop up the DNA.
J: Yeah, but you've got to listen to the details and then you'll get it. This is called CRISPRkit, and it was developed by Stanley Key's lab at Stanford, and they're offering a groundbreaking opportunity for students or anyone to perform hands-on CRISPR gene editing experiments. And they're saying for like $2 a kit, students use chromoproteins which change color when edited to visualize CRISPR in action.
C: So cool.
J: The team includes Matthew Lau and Marvin Collins, and they're aiming to make biology accessible. Particularly for underrepresented students. So let's get into some details here. So the project started when Lau, who is still in high school, joined Key's lab after a summer camp at Stanford, and he was inspired by an expensive kit he saw at a conference. So Lau and Collins set out to create an affordable do-it-yourself kit for classrooms. So their experiment involved using CRISPR to turn off chromoproteins, and what this did was it created a visual color change that students could track. The biggest challenge they had was making it safe, making it inexpensive, inexpensive enough for classrooms, without the needs for any of the biohazardous chemicals or expensive equipment. There's lots of expensive equipment that could be involved when you do CRISPR, when you perform CRISPR. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So you ever hear of something called a pipette?
S: Oh yeah.
C: Oh yeah.
E: I've heard of pipette too. Pipette was the name of the dog that got eaten by the shark in Jaws. Go ahead.
C: I know pipettes very well.
J: These could be 500 bucks a pop. They created a much, much less expensive version of that. So other things that they did, the kits use a cell-free transcription translation, TXTL, this is a system that allows CRISPR experiments to be performed in a tube without the need for live cells. And this innovation removes the complex barriers like biohazards and the safety. It's very expensive to do these things and to make them safe. And this is what typically would keep these types of technologies out of classrooms.
C: Oh, that's so it's like a fake cell.
J: Yeah, I think so.
C: Yeah, it's kind of like, like I remember when we used to do like blood type lab with our freshmen, we wouldn't use real blood back in the day, you would prick your finger and you'd use your own blood in a lab. And then of course, that became like not a thing people did. So they developed fake blood. And you would put the fake blood in and see how it reacts to the different RH factors and things like that.
J: Like I said, their kit has a dual color system where the students can visually track the fact that a gene editing was performed. And I think that's really cool. They can make the results happen instantly and have them be very understandable. And the kit is designed to be analyzed using just a common tool like a smartphone. And they have something called a CRISPectra, which processes images of the results and it eliminates the need for the other expensive lab equipment. So the project has already been tested in over 20 schools and it continues to gain traction in the Bay Area. And again they want to make biology and experiments like this just more accessible for students so they can do it in the classroom. So you know I was talking about the pipettes? So they're used to measure and transport very, very small amounts of liquid samples. And the more expensive versions, they're really very precise, but they're expensive. And this would make it so students could never access this type of technology. That's why they invented their own version, which does the same thing, maybe not as cleanly and maybe not as precisely, but they don't need that kind of precision in the classroom. So during COVID-19, LAU continued to develop this CRISP kit, and it allows students to analyze the results by uploading their photos, and the progress was being made. And then they finally, in 2021, they did end up having trials in high schools, which I think it's great that they did it with kids that young. And most of the kids were successful in completing the experiments. I think this is a wonderful idea, first of all. It's just a really cool thing. People would get very excited about this. And I also think that we want kids to get interested in science and to become scientists. All over the world we want kids to become interested in this because being a scientist is a very noble pursuit and I personally think that the advent of science and the progress that science makes and it also can be a very enriching thing and I think just like teaching kids I'd love if kids were being taught critical thinking. You know how kids are really into magic? Most kids will sit there and watch you perform magic. Because they have, at that age, at those younger ages, their minds are tuned for that. They tune into it, they love it, they want to know how the magic tricks are being done and everything. And that's the perfect time, I think, to hook kids into the idea that magic and science have a lot in common. You know, you could teach it that way. So anyway, I just love this. I think this is such a cool thing that they that they came up with that they spent a ton of their personal time trying to develop and they finally came out with CRISPR kit. And man, if I can get my hands on one, I would love to do this.
C: I'm sure you could, Jay. I mean, and not to belittle this because it is really, really cool. But if they didn't do it, somebody else would have. We learn, especially in college labs, but also in high school bio labs, you're learning the tools that are used in industry. You're learning the basics of them. And science is changing really rapidly. So the stuff that we did in bio lab back in the day was based on the available technology. This technology has become so commonplace, it doesn't make sense for kids in bio lab to not be exposed to it. It's going to be it's important for them to know what they're looking forward to, if they continue on and do lab experimentation outside. So the classroom is where you learn how to do the lab experimentation. And then the lab is where you learn is where you actually do the experimentation.
J: Yeah, and I just love this idea that it's inexpensive enough where local high schools could buy this for their students and let them let them experiment with it. And hopefully the teacher will be able to talk intelligently about CRISPR and educate them about what it is, what its potential is. I think that something like a CRISPR kit could be very powerful in the classroom.
S: Right. I mean, maybe in 10 years they'll be doing CRISPR in high school. Like actually doing it.
C: Yeah, like actually doing it with real cells. It's hard to get real cells.
J: That's scary.
C: I don't think so. It'll be safe. It'll be done safely.
S: We'd like to think so.
E: No more harm than that kit that they used to sell to the kids in the 50s with, what, uranium in it?
S: Yeah, remember that?
C: Well, that's the thing, right?
S: Well, you could get a chemistry kit which has actual chemicals in it. It could be potentially dangerous.
C: Yeah, but there's also, like, there's so much more regulation now, like, it's going to be done safely.
S: Yeah.
C: It's just different now. You can't do the same stuff in the classroom that you could do back in the day.
News Item #3 - SCAM Market (32:30)[edit]
S: All right, Evan, tell us about how the scam market is doing. By scam I mean so-called complementary and alternative medicine.
E: Perfectly said, yep. Well, how is it doing? I stumbled across an article just recently which kind of pointed us into the direction of the answer to that very question. Let's see if you guys are aware where we stand globally, the complementary and alternative medicine market. What do you think the value of that in United States dollars in 2023 was?
C: The entire market?
E: The entire market worldwide.
C: Worldwide? Trillion?
E: Yep. This is global.
S: Several billion.
E: Oh, it's several billion. Try north of a hundred billion.
C: Oh my God. Okay.
E: North 28. If you said 128 billion, Cara, then you'd be correct.
C: I said a trillion, so I was way off. Price is Right rules, I'm screwed.
E: Well, okay. So that's where we are in 2023. Where are they going from here? Where will it be 10 years from now? And that's what this particular study looked at. The study was released, let's see. So it's over at the website called Brainy Insights. Which is kind of an interesting website. I'm sure it's not run by bots. Well, at least not that I think. See what I did there? Their tagline is, we offer tailored research studies to help our clients stay ahead in the competition. So basically, they're a market research company. And they do insights and data analysis for businesses, groups, and all sorts of things, right? So that is what they do. You bring these people in and they'll crunch the numbers, they'll crunch the data, and they'll give you the reports that you're looking for, forecasts. Where are we going to be in the future? They claim to have a robust forecasting and estimation model that meets their client's objectives of high quality output within a short span of time. Okay, so, and among the industries they track, well, automotive, transportation, energy, power, food, beverages, I mean, you name it, chemicals, materials, information, communication, and healthcare. Yep, healthcare indeed. They are not afraid to collect and analyze the data about alternative health and complementary medicine markets. And what they came up with is that 10 years from now, 2023, the worldwide market will be at $664 billion. That is a five times increase of where we are now. In 10 years, it's going to increase by a factor of five, five times. Yep, according to their research. Here's some notes from the study itself. The complementary and alternative medicine market is anticipated to grow over the next several years due to significant regulatory reforms and a shifting regulatory environment. They are implying that the laws are changing such that it's becoming unfortunately more favourable worldwide for these companies to flourish in peddling their products, their services, and so forth. They said strong international alliances will be built between nations to work together on alternative medicine projects which will be adopted and spread worldwide. So they're kind of joining forces, a collection, a conglomerate, if you were. They're going to work together to help grow the market is what they're saying. The market for complementary and alternative medicine in Asia Pacific specifically is expanding due to the rise in demand for herbal supplements. And each region, and they kind of deal with it on a continent by continent basis is what I – and they do have a country by country but the overview is basically continental is how they sort of divide it up. So herbal supplements are big, driving most of this market in Asia. Whereas in Europe–
C: I like how you say Europe. I don't know. It feels – is that a Connecticutian thing? How do you guys say it?
S: Europe. Europe.
C: Okay. All right.
S: How do you say it?
C: I say Europe, like you, but Ev says Europe.
S: Europe? No, it's Europe.
E: Europe?
C: Europe. I like it, though. Sorry.
S: It's Europe.
E: Europe, Steve.
S: Like urine.
C: Urine.
E: Urine. European. European.
C: Urineal.
E: But overall, the European market for CAM is the largest. It accounts for 27% share right now of global revenue and is expected to grow.
C: Oh, it's bigger than? Okay.
E: Yeah, I know, surprisingly. I would have maybe guessed North America would be, but no, Europe is kind of leading the charge with this. So the National Medical Commission in India, for example, suggested in September 2021 that each healing college, they have healing colleges, create a Department of Integrative Medicine research to encourage the merging of contemporary medicine with homeopathy and indigenous Indian medicinal systems like Ayurveda. So, which we've spoken about before, obviously these we've spoken about before, but they're encouraging the merging of blending these in to what they are calling contemporary medicine. I don't think we're surprised at what we're hearing here because we've seen this trend, but it's playing out in real dollars and cents in the marketplace. And you know that if investors, among other people, get a whiff of where they're going to find profit in the future, they're not going to know homeopathy from Reiki, from chemotherapy. They don't care. They're just going to smell the opportunity to ride this and make a buck on it. Unfortunately, it's going to come at the cost of more people investing their health in a lot of these products and a lot of these treatments and things which are proven, what, to add up to nothing? Herbal cures, homeopathic treatments. These are most frequently utilized, by the way, most frequently utilized in both highly developed and in developing nations, but more so even in the higher developed nations. Rather than the developing nations, but they're seeing the growth in both areas. And among the restraints and the reasons the things that are holding back certain levels of growth in certain areas, they're talking about in developing nations, a lack of qualified professionals and poor healthcare infrastructure in those developing countries. Where the, this is where the market for complementary and alternative medicine will encounter some growth problems. Which is ironic to think that the people on the planet who need the most medical attention in a kind of way are going to be at an advantage, if I can even say that. I feel bad saying that because they're going to lag behind in this rush of market growth that's going to be happening in these industries which actually do nothing for people.
S: It's one giant scam.
E: It's weird, it's really weird.
S: Yeah, unfortunately I think the horse is out of the barn. It's going to be hard to try to regulate the industry co protect consumers from fraud. Which you would think is like a basic function of government, protecting consumers from fraud. But it's just nowhere to be seen in the alternative complementary industry. They've managed to pull off a fantastic con, which is to convince people that if it's alternative, it exists in this alternate universe where there's no quality control, there's no standard of care, you don't have to have science or evidence or anything. The gurus have won, basically. They've managed to convince society that they're not con artists.
E: It's more than a foothold, right? It is a slow but steady merging with real medical practices and standards, and it's totally blurring the lines.
S: And this is billions of dollars, which is not only funding pseudoscience, it's funding conspiracy theories and anti-expertise, anti-institutionalism. I mean, it is funding anti-vaccine nonsense. It is funding a lot of harmful misinformation and nonsense. If you think back to the COVID pandemic, a lot of the problems that we encountered with that were funded by alternative medicine, basically. The conspiracy subculture, the pseudoscience subculture, and the alternative medicine subculture are completely intertwined. You know, they're mostly the same thing. You know, go to any conspiracy site and they're selling alternative medicine on the margins.
E: Absolutely. Supplements are a mainstay, probably the number one. Advertising. Here we go with bots and things.
S: I mean, we've talked about the fact that Alex Jones is basically a supplement peddler and all the bullshit that he says is to the service of generating an audience and sales of his patent medicine nonsense. That's what it's all about.
E: I mean, right, he's the guy who traveled in the wagon in the 19th century selling the snake oil out of the back of the wagon.
S: Exactly.
E: It's no more than that.
S: Very, very harmful. Very, very harmful.
E: Yeah, extremely harmful. And a really horrible trend, especially as more people are going to need actual medicine to deal with their things. Because they are talking about, in this article also, about rising prevalence of chronic diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disorders, which I didn't really have a chance to research to see if that is, is there a rising prevalence of cancer and cardiovascular disorders? Is that a true statement that they're making here?
S: You have to distinguish incidence from prevalence. Incidence is the occurrence over time. Prevalence is how many people right now have the condition. So, if you live longer with a disease, the prevalence goes up, right?
C: Also, if there are more people on the planet, the prevalence goes up.
S: Yeah, that's true. But even if you do per capita, whatever, just living longer with cancer, living longer with heart disease, or living longer with diabetes or anything, means that the prevalence is going to go up. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting more disease. The incidence isn't necessarily going up. The incidence of cancer—
C: No, but it does mean it's taxing the healthcare system.
E: Yes, and that was their point, is that the dollars have to be stretched further, and in the absence of those dollars, here comes complementary and alternative medicine to help fill the gap.
S: The incidence of cancer depends on where you're talking about in the world, but I know in the US, it's actually decreasing a little bit.
E: That's what I thought, and I recall you mentioning that.
S: And survival's going up.
E: I wasn't sure.
S: But the incidence of diabetes is going up.
C: I think some cancers are going up. I wouldn't say across the board.
S: You're right. It may not be for every single cancer, but if you take all cancer, it is true. I think it's slightly decreasing.
C: Yeah, because we've done so many lifestyle preventions. Lung cancer.
S: Fewer people are smoking. And I think that's where most of the gains are, actually, is in that.
C: Well, and cervical now because of HPV vaccines.
S: Absolutely.
C: Yeah.
S: No, absolutely. But diseases of obesity are increasing.
J: Steve, do you think that the government should do something about this? Yeah, 100%.
E: And guess what they are doing, Jay? They're helping fund it.
S: They're doing two things, jack and shit.
E: And it's worse than that because they're saying in this article, they've found that governments are playing along and they're making investments in infrastructure and other things.
S: This is like the Barefoot Doctor thing that China did. It's like, well, we can't afford real medicine, but the people will eat up this cheap fake medicine, so let's give them that. Right? That's what it is. It's cheap in the short run.
C: There's also some really interesting intricacies with nationalism and nationalistic politics, especially in India.
S: That's how they sell it.
C: Yeah, where sort of, this is our non-Western we knew this first.
S: And that was overt again with Mao doing the barefoot doctor thing. It's like, how are we going to sell this to everybody? Well, we'll just tell them it's traditional Chinese medicine. We will leverage pride in our culture in order to sell this when it's really just depriving them cutting edge medicine, actual real medicine. And again, the scam basically worked. And in fact, it worked so well they were able to export it to other countries.
News Item #4 - ADHD Increasing (47:25)[edit]
S: All right, so tell me what you guys think is the incidence, remember we just talked about incidence and prevalence, is the incidence of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, increasing recently over time? Or is it pretty stable or is it decreasing?
J: Well, I have another answer, Steve. I think that we're detecting it better.
E: I agree with Jay.
S: Mm-hmm.
C: And that does increase incidence, right?
S: That does increase incidence. The incidence is the number of diagnoses.
E: And this is the same with autism.
S: Same with autism.
C: Yeah, I think, yes, we are diagnosing it more than we ever did in the past.
S: Yeah. So the diagnostic incidence, so you can't distinguish the diagnostic incidence from the true incidence if you're discussing that question, right? So you will read that in the literature, like what is the quote unquote true incidence, meaning the actual existence of it in the population versus how much are we diagnosing it. So, here's another question. This is very interesting. How far back does the diagnosis of ADHD go? When was the first time it was recognized as a clinical entity?
E: I'd be purely guessing.
J: Isn't it like in the 70s?
E: I would say 70s as well.
C: It's probably like halfway through the DSMs.
S: So, it was first described in the late 19th century as children who are highly distractible. That was recognized in the late 1800s. It was first presented publicly in 1902. George Frederick Still gave a lecture who characterized it as an abnormal defect of moral control in children.
E: Oh, moral control. Oh my gosh.
S: But the ADHD first appeared in the DSM 1968, so that sort of started the modern era of diagnosing ADHD. And like many new diagnoses, it kind of gets a slow start as people learn what it is and learn how to diagnose it and people learn how to treat it and deal with it. And then it kind of took off in the 90s and the aughts.
E: Ritalin prescriptions, right, for ADHD?
S: That's kind of old school, but sure.
E: I'm just trying to put it on the timeline, because I remember Ritalin from like the 80s, I think, or the early 90s.
C: In the DSM-2, which is when it first showed up, it was called hyperkinetic reaction of childhood.
S: Yeah, yeah.
E: Okay, I could think of worse things.
S: The prevalence was 6.1% in children in 1997-1998, and then that increased to 10.2% in 2015-2016, so that's when the big increase occurred. And then it's sort of plateaued, but it's still eking up. It's now up to 11.4% for one in nine U.S. children. Numbers in adults really depend on how you diagnose it, but the numbers can be similar. So which it should be because ADHD is a lifelong syndrome, it is not something you grow out of, right? It's just a trait of your brain function.
C: It's a disorder first identified in childhood.
S: Yes. Usually, but not always identified in childhood.
C: No, but it should, yeah, just because somebody else didn't identify it doesn't mean it wasn't there to be identified.
S: Right, absolutely. It presents in childhood, even if it's not diagnosed in childhood. Yeah, that's what we would say. So again, Cara, I know you probably know this from Jay and Evan, do you know what like the neuroanatomical correlate, like the cause of ADHD is? What is it neurologically?
J: It's the lack of access to the frontal lobe.
S: Yeah, I wouldn't say access to the frontal lobe. It's a relative decrease in a specific type of frontal lobe function, not all frontal lobe function, but a specific type called executive function. And executive function is your highest level. Executive function is a good word for it. It's the most evolved part of your brain that allows you to do long-term strategic planning and to inhibit your more primitive desires and your behaviors in order to achieve those strategic goals. So it's partly your ability to control and inhibit your behavior and partly your ability to make good decisions, right? Saying, I shouldn't do this or I shouldn't be doing that.
C: Non-impulsive decisions.
S: Right.
E: You shouldn't eat chocolate cake every day.
S: Exactly. Not desire-based or more primitive decisions, but decisions that are strategic, executive decisions. And that exists on a bell curve basically and essentially ADHD means you're at the lower end of that bell curve in terms of your executive function ability and that's a lifelong condition. Of course, manifestations will vary depending on education, counseling, training, experience, whatever. You know, there's always going to be that environmental component, but the basic wiring of your brain is a brain trait, right? It's basically there. So used to be thought of as, of course, it was blamed on bad parenting, right?
C: Always.
S: Like everything, initially.
C: Always the mother.
S: Yeah, usually the mother, but bad mothering, bad parenting. Same thing with autism, right? Refrigerator mothers. And then we realize, no, it has nothing to do with parenting. You're born that way, basically. It's just that your brain's wired. All right, so why has the diagnosed prevalence been increasing, right? That's an interesting question. So one possibility is that there's a very real increase happening, right? We can't eliminate that possibility. Another possibility is what? Do you guys have any guesses as to what other factors lead to an increase in diagnosis, even in the absence of a real increase?
J: Better training?
C: Yeah, there's two that stick out to me. One of them is we're screening for it.
S: Yeah, we're looking for it more. Jay said we're better at diagnosing it. That could be it.
C: Right, right.
E: Yeah, I don't think there's not like a blood test or something.
S: Nope. It's purely clinical diagnosis.
C: It's all behavior based. The other one for me is that we have more external distractions, and so it's manifesting in ways that are easier to detect right now.
S: Yes, that's one hypothesis. So in terms of the diagnosis, like making the diagnosis, so you mentioned a couple of things. We're looking for it more, we're perhaps better at diagnosing it clinically, more practitioners are aware of it and know how to make the diagnosis, but also, people are seeking out the diagnosis more. So back in the 70s, 80s, it was a huge stigma attached to the diagnosis. And now it's essentially flipped in that there are services attached to the diagnosis. Whereas parents maybe were avoiding the diagnosis because of the stigma and that they were going to get blamed, right, for it. Like, he's just a normal kid, leave him alone, right? But now it's like, oh, if we get an actual formal diagnosis, then we can ask for accommodations and we get resources. And it's actually now a positive thing.
C: Well, and adults too. I can diagnose as an adult. I can take stimulants, which are like performance enhancing at work.
S: You could take longer time to complete tests. So the incentives have flipped where now people are seeking the diagnosis as opposed to avoiding it. And then there's also a couple other things. One is diagnostic substitution, where people who would have had other diagnoses in the past are now getting this diagnosis. That's more important, I think, for autism than for ADHD. But like in the past, a kid might have been diagnosed as oppositional, right? Just a bad kid. And now it's like, oh, he's actually just has executive dysfunction. So that's the diagnostic substitution. And then finally, an expansion of the diagnostic criteria, right? So that we're casting a wider numbers. The same thing happened with ASD. It's an autism spectrum disorder. There's a broader spectrum that fit into the diagnosis. We recognize different types. There's basically a hyperactive type without inattention, for example. And so you get more kids will fit the diagnostic criteria. And we see that when diagnostic criteria shift over time, diagnoses can skyrocket, right? Or when practices change, diagnoses can leap up. So how do we know if there's a real increase going on in the background? You could do studies that look at, well, if you look at different age cohorts and you survey them for the diagnosis, is it the same over different age groups or is it higher in younger cohorts, meaning that the incidence is increasing? or you could say look at records you could look back and say if we apply the exact same surveillance and diagnostic criteria do we come up with the same incidence over time. And that's basically what we're seeing that it really the the increase is probably not quote-unquote real. But Cara, what you said is interesting and that is still an active hypothesis that maybe like the genetics are not changing over time, but ADHD in particular, more so than autism, is a very context-dependent kind of manifestation. You'll notice it more in situations where you're required to maintain attention and inhibit your behavior for long periods of time, right?
C: Yeah, that's why a lot of parents...
S: Like school.
C: Yeah, the kids take, not all, but a lot of kids take their ADHD meds during the school week and they don't take them on the weekends.
S: Or over the summer, right? Not that it doesn't matter to their behavior, but it's just not as necessary.
C: It's not as problematic and they're just outside running around in circles all day. So yeah, phones. I mean, social media.
S: So the question is, is social media, is electronic devices, are we basically, we're raising these kids with short attention span theatre, and is that training them to require instant demand? I want instant gratification. I need to be distracted all the time. They're not learning boredom tolerance. They're not learning how to maintain their own calm attention. Because they're constantly being fed, frenetically being fed information, entertainment. And I've noticed that in myself, like my tolerance for slow moving media or whatever, if I don't get instant gratification, my frustration level is way lower. Isn't it guys? Don't you think that's true?
J: Absolutely. My attention span is minuscule now compared to what it used to be.
C: But beyond attention span, the point you made is important, Steve. Frustration tolerance, ability to self-soothe, those things go out the window when the fix is grab my phone, grab my phone, grab my phone. You take the phone out of the kid's hand and they melt down and cannot be consoled because it's the only, it's safety net for them.
S: So, like, I'll notice, for example, again, I think I have pretty good executive function, so I'm thinking, like, at the low end of the spectrum here, but back in the day, you would wait five minutes for one picture to download, and we would sit there and wait for it to download. And now I definitely notice, like, if I don't get instant response to every click of the mouse, I get frustrated. It's like, come on, what the hell? This is taking more than half a second for this to happen. The other thing is, if I'm doing something that I know is going to take more than five seconds, I'll pull out my phone and do something. Right?
E: It's funny because it's true.
S: It's true. But I am moody in that there are times where I'm like, all right, I just put everything down. And I'm going to watch freaking 2001 as a slow ass movie and just get into that zone and just not multitask. That's the other thing. My daughters, man, they typically have three things going on at once.
J: Why is that? Why do they do that? I don't get it.
S: I think it's that they constantly need that stimulation. There's a lull in one. So like they're doing that. So typically what they do is they have the primary thing that they're doing. They have a secondary thing that they're doing to fill in the lulls. And then they have a background thing that is just sort of semi paying attention to that's running in the background. Right?
E: Right. It's like having no blank space on the canvas. Something has to be happening at all times, no matter what.
C: Something I used to notice in the group home, which was just bizarre behavior to me, but now I'm seeing it more and more, is that the girl, when I was working in foster care, the girls would just leave their phones open, like meaning they would call a friend and just be on the phone with their friend for hours, but they weren't always paying attention to each other.
E: No, no, just the fact that the channel was open.
C: Yeah, it's the weirdest thing to me.
E: It was a sense of comfort. Yeah, a sense of comfort.
C: Yeah.
E: I've seen that as well, Cara, in people.
C: And I don't think that's a behavior of people who grew up with the phone on the wall with the kinky cord. You know what I mean? It's just that wasn't our template for how you engage over a phone.
S: Right.
C: And now, yeah, I see it a lot. And I think you're right. It is a comfort. It's a safety net. But it's also a, well, there's at least always something there. You know, it's like the watching TV with the phone in your hand, and then you miss the thing on the TV, and then you miss the thing on the phone. I hate it.
S: Yeah.
C: That's why I like reading a book. You can't do something else while you're reading a book.
S: Yeah, I agree.
C: You just can't.
S: I do a lot of reading for that reason, too.
E: In our household, growing up in the 70s, the TV would be on in the background regardless if someone was watching it or not.
C: That's bananas to me.
E: It's true, though.
C: I know people like, yeah, and I see it with a lot of people. I can't do it.
S: It is good, I think, to consciously disconnect for periods of time. As we've said before, it's less about the screen time and more about the not screen time. You need to have hours in your day where you're doing something that requires your attention, where you're not multitasking, you're not constantly being distracted by electronics, where you're focusing on whatever that one thing is. And maybe it's actual interaction with other people or playing analog games with people or whatever, doing something. And we always try to build that into our day. Like, even though it's hard, like when we're at dinner, it's like no phones at dinner. We're talking. This is family time. Look at me. Talk to me. Put the phone down. But again, we have to resist the temptation to do it ourselves because we all want to just whip it out and check your email.
C: Yeah, that's like what you were talking about on the school episode. You can't expect kids to have impulse control that you don't have.
S: Right.
C: Your frontal lobe is way more developed than theirs.
S: Absolutely. Anyway, interesting to think about. But the good news is ADHD itself, as a neurological condition, which is what it is, is eminently treatable and it makes a dramatic difference. So it is a disorder in that in order to have the diagnosis, you have to have not only a certain number of behavioral and symptomatic traits, you also, it needs to have demonstrable harm, right? It actually causes negative impact on your life. And treatment has a demonstrable benefit. It reduces those negative impacts on your life. It improves your school performance. It improves your job prospects, your lifetime earning potential, your relationships, your probability that you'll be in jail. I mean, all these metrics improve with treatment, which includes both medication and cognitive behavioral therapy or with some type of therapy, although some people just need medication.
C: Yeah, it's one of those, it's one of the few things, well I shouldn't say few, but it's one of a handful of things in the DSM where more of the variance is medication.
S: Yeah.
C: They're just really effective with ADHD. Same with schizophrenia, same with bipolar disorder. Like there's just a few things where it's like, yeah, the meds matter. Like they really matter.
S: And this has been one of those things that's been a big difference in my experience personally as a skeptic and a physician over the last 30 years. In the 1990s, there was so much stigma attached to the diagnosis. So many people are like, oh, you're just putting a Band-Aid on a problem. You should be teaching the kids. Again, it's like the bad parenting bias and thinking that it was over-diagnosed and et cetera, and really a lot of mental illness denial. Like, these are just kids.
C: These are all disorders of will.
S: Yeah, of will, exactly.
C: They're not trying hard enough.
S: Yeah, rather than, and then really criticizing, and there was actually a book called Blame the Brain. It's like, oh, you're trying to blame the brain for bad parenting. No, we're trying to properly diagnose a neurological disorder. That's what's happening. That's what it demonstrably is. If you do fMRI studies, you could see the differences in brain function.
C: Imagine saying that to a kid with epilepsy.
S: I know.
C: You're just blaming your brain for all those seizures.
S: Yeah. Well, they used to blame demons for it.
E: Right.
C: That's true.
E: Yeah, that's true. Call in the exorcist.
S: Really, seriously. Let's move on.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:04:19)[edit]
S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.
J: All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. [plays Noisy] What do you guys think about that?
E: It sounded like a song of some kind. It had some structure to it, to me. So is it therefore, I would think, instrument of some kind?
J: Well, a listener named Sam Ahir said, Hi Jay, first time guesser. I feel like this is part of a soundtrack from the video game Outer Wilds. So it is not, and I'm really curious to hear that. I was wondering if you can give me a, if you have any of the audio, I'd like to hear how similar it is. I often wonder if people use any of these sounds in their constructed sounds that they use particularly for video games and things like that. Another listener named Kevin Schalley wrote in and said, it sound like someone using a handsaw as an instrument. I believe they may modulate the pitch by bending it more or less. This is a cool guess. I mean, if you listen to someone playing a handsaw, it does have like that vibration type of sound to it. So there is some similarities, but that is not correct. Another listener named Adam wrote in and said, I'm always late to the party on these, but I have a family of guesses for episode 1001. Here they are in order. So you guys know every once in a while I'll read an email from Adam and his two kids. So Elise says geese playing a guitar, Olivia says whale songs, Kristen says someone singing into a tube, and Adam says playing back Led Zeppelin vocals in a cave. I think Adam's guess was the best one out of the four, because if you know Robert Plant's voice, it is kind of creepy like that. So anyway, those are fun guesses. And then I have one more guest named Alex Moore, and he said, I love this sound. It reminds me of a sound being played on a keyboard, then run through a material before reaching an amplifier. For fun, I'll guess it's reverberated through crushed ice. Cool guess, not correct. I do have a winner. I actually had more than one winner. This was the first person that wrote in. It's Kathy Taylor, and she says, I got it. It's a Viri, an American thrush, which is a nightingale. And it was a noisy for number episode number 635. So I kind of forgot that I did this one. It's pretty amazing that I keep most of these noises in my head and don't double up all the time. Yeah, it's just interesting. I mean this noisy is so odd what's going on here. Let me give you a little description. What they've done is that they've simply just slowed down the bird song. And what they discovered was that there is incredible structure to it. It's nuanced. There's lots of different parts. There seems to be a melody and a chorus that's happening in there. I don't know, guys, I don't know what you think, but I think it's like it almost sounds like there's an intelligence behind it. A real like almost like they're thinking about it. Here, I'll play it back for you. [plays Noisy] Isn't that cool?
C: Yeah, you're getting all of the little variations in tone.
J: All right, so we had a winner, and I find that noisy to be really, really wonderful. So I have a new noisy this week. This was sent in by a listener named DL.
S: If you have misophonia, or if you don't like annoying noises, you're going to want to turn the volume way down right now.
J: And here it is. [plays Noisy] If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, important announcement.
S: Yes.
J: NOTACON will be in White Plains.
E: Okay.
J: It turns out that the cost of DC hotels was extraordinarily high. That's basically it. We could look in other cities, and I will happily do that at a later date for future NOTACONs.
S: Yeah, we're really going to try to do a different city next time, but in order to keep our timetable, we just need to go to a place that we've been to before.
J: So in one week you could start registration. I will let you know on the show. I will have the link on the Skeptic's Guide homepage. We have two shows coming up in DC. It looks like right now both of those shows are going to be on December 7th. You can go to our homepage right now at theskepticsguide.org and you could purchase tickets for the extravaganza and then the private show will be up as well. That will be up next week for purchase.
S: Jay, I have an announcement. We talked about this briefly on the 1000th show, but we are looking for SGU correspondents, people who want to collaborate with us in terms of producing segments for the show. If you are interested in being an SGU correspondent, which basically means that every few episodes or so you would produce a five or so minute segment that would be either a news item or a discussion of a pseudoscientific topic or a commentary or an analysis of something, something like the segments we do on the show. And if you want, if you're interested in that, then send us an email at INFO@theskepticsguide.org with a brief bio and send us an MP3 file with a five to 10 minute clip of you doing just that, presenting a news item or, or some segment. And that's basically your audition. We've already had some significant interest in this, but we want to make sure we give people enough time to hear about it and to produce something and send it our way if they're interested. There's no time limit or anything. It's kind of an open kind of audition sort of thing, which is sort of take it as it comes. And yeah, if you have any questions about that, just again, just email us at info at.
Emails (1:10:41)[edit]
S: All right, we're gonna do a couple emails. First one comes from Colton, who writes, congrats on 1000 episodes. In the 1000th episode, there was some discussion about fringe movements changing their name in an attempt to legitimize themselves such as UFOs changing to UAPs or cold fusion becoming low energy nuclear reactions. It was mentioned that this is a good giveaway that something fishy is going on. I agree with this, but it did remind me of a part of climate denialist rhetoric. I know some would respond that this is exactly what happened when global warming changed to global climate change. Some would say global warming was unpopular, so they changed it just to be more palatable. Or they say global warming wasn't happening, so they had to change the name. Equating that with UFOs weren't real, so they had to change the name. I think we as skeptics have a good idea why the climate name change is different, but I would love to hear it vocalized on the show, why exactly this is different from, for example, UFOs changing to UAPs. So yeah, that's a great question. Interestingly, just today when I was going through our potential TikTok segments to do today, we did our TikTok live stream today, one of the ones was just exactly this. It was essentially Donald Trump saying they changed the name to climate change because the world is not warming, right? Making that exact point. But of course, global warming is still used, it is still appropriate, and the globe is warming on average. But the reason why it shifted to climate change in more technical scientific discussion is because the world is not uniformly warming everywhere. It's an average warming. And it's surface temperature warming. It doesn't necessarily mean that every part of the environment at every level in every part of the world is warming. The climate is changing. Some parts of the planet may be getting cooler, others warmer, even though the total net amount of heat energy in the system is increasing over time. So both global warming and global climate change are both accurate and appropriate. But global climate change is a little bit more technically inclusive of all the things that are happening. And so that's why that shift was made. It wasn't a branding thing. It wasn't a way of avoiding inconvenient reality. Or it wasn't a way of avoiding stigma, like with cold fusion. And I will say that UAPs is partly that as well, meaning that when the Pentagon was investigating it, they didn't change the name from UFOs to UAPs simply to avoid the stigma of UFOs. It's because the scope of their investigations are not limited to flying objects, right? It's now unidentified anomalous phenomena. It's not even aerial. It used to be aerial phenomena. But now they're also investigating things in the ocean. So they just change it to unidentified anomalous phenomena. So I don't really think that UFOs switching to UAPs was a dodge. Low energy nuclear reactions was 100% a dodge. That was because of the wanted to avoid the stigma of cold fusion. There was no other reason for that. UFOs to UAPs was a little bit of both but was, at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned, was more to be like a technical technocratic designation. And global warming to global climate change was just scientific, technically more inclusive, more accurate, but it wasn't a dodge either. You know, people are going to think what they're going to want to think about it, right?
E: Whatever they're predisposed to, right?
S: So for the second email, I'm actually going to respond to a number of emails. As predicted, there was quite a few emails responding to my discussion last week on net metering and solar energy, which tells me that I need to discuss it again, right? There is more detail. There is more nuance that I think is important to get to. Most of the feedback, some of it was not much of it. Some of it was basically global warming deniers. So of course, they're not going to like anything that I had to say. But a lot of it was just trying to technically correct me, but the correction was not correct. So basically, what a lot of people were saying was, well, one person thought I needed to hear the physics of energy transmission. There's energy loss in heat. Yes, there's a certain amount of energy loss when you transfer energy over. The utility companies are taking the hit on any energy loss. When a residential solar user uses the grid as a virtual battery backup, excess energy we sell to the utility company, and then we buy it back from them when we need more energy. And net metering means that the utility company gives us a full credit, right? If I send one unit of energy to the utility company, I get a credit. And then when I get the same unit back, I spend one credit. They're not giving me money, right? It's just credit for electricity. Again, the claim that we're discussing is the utility companies are complaining that, well, but we lose money because they're not paying for infrastructure and there's inherent losses and all these things. The point of the discussion was, even if you include all of those things, that what the evidence shows is that residential solar saves the utility companies money, because it reduces the need to buy extra fuel to have more peaker plants or whatever, because a lot of that solar energy that's being produced is during peak usage, while people are running their air conditioners, etc. It actually is not costing the utility company more money to run whatever it is that they do, and therefore it's not costing our non-solar using fellow residents any more money. The only thing that's happening is that it's breaking the utility company's monopoly, because now I can buy electricity, essentially, from a competitor that is offering greener and cheaper electricity. And so they're losing revenue to a competitor. It's not costing them money. It's saving them money, right? So that's all that's happening. So all of the things that you don't have to keep bringing up new ways in which there's an inefficiency or the utility companies covering costs. The study has shown that there's a net advantage to them by having residential solar. Some people point out that referring to the utility company is misleading because the marketplace is broken up into many different kinds of companies. The producer is not necessarily the same company that handles transmission or the infrastructure, whatever. That's fine. I don't care. That doesn't really matter to the point either, using the utility company as a euphemism for all of the companies that are involved in energy providing as a utility. So here's the thing. Here's the context that I didn't really explicitly discuss, which I think puts everything into context. The whole point of this is that we're trying to maximize solar power, right? We're trying to maximize the amount of energy that we are producing that is low carbon, right? We're trying to decarbonize our energy infrastructure, and this is one way to do that. It's a way that's actually very effective. It's among the lowest hanging fruit because solar is relatively cheap. And what you basically have is either private citizens or private companies buying solar infrastructure to add to the grid. And that infrastructure investment that they're making, again, helps everybody. It helps decarbonize the power sector. And we just want to make that as feasible as possible. So the problem is that if you don't do net metering, if you do anything less than net metering, it makes it less financially viable to either buy your solar panels outright to lease them. It increases the payback time for that, which means fewer people are going to do it. And then here's the thing. So the option that I took, which is the option that people who don't have $50,000 laying around, this is the option that they're going to take. So poor people or people who don't have a lot of resources, the option for them, if you're a homeowner who's living paycheck to paycheck, you can still just buy solar as a service. No money down. You just let them put solar panels on your roof in exchange for a contract that you buy 100% of the electricity that is produced. But of course, that only works if either you're using 100% of the energy you produce, which for most parts of the country you're not going to, or you get net beatering, right? If I'm only getting 20 cents on the dollar for my electricity, I'm basically buying that electricity twice. I'm buying it at full price from the solar company, selling it at wholesale to the electricity company, and then buying it back at full retail price again. That's the ripoff that I'm talking about. That basically would kill that segment of the residential solar industry. It would kill it dead. It's unviable. And that means that only people who have lots of resources could afford solar, which is the opposite of what we want to do, right? We want to maximize solar. At least up to that 20%, 30%, 40% that is optimal in terms of the energy mix. This is why I said smallest violin. I'm going to take it one step further. Utility companies have nothing to complain about. And I'll tell you why. Because given that our collective goal is to maximize renewable energy and decarbonize the energy sector as quickly as possible, you have a number of options, right? You guys know what some of those options are?
C: Options for what specifically?
S: For decarbonizing, incentivizing the industry to decarbonize.
E: Incentivizing the industry.
S: Yeah. There's basically carrots and sticks, right? So there's one thing that would work great, and that's cap and trade or taxing carbon. We could tax the hell out of carbon, and that would be a really big incentive to decarbonize as fast as possible.
E: People do change their behaviors on taxation.
S: That's the stick, right? The industry doesn't want that. They basically politically killed that. So what the Biden administration went with is an all-carrot approach. We're just going to give them incentives for investing in green energy. And that's worked really well. It has worked very, very well. But it's an all-subsidy, all-carrot approach. So the industry got their wet dream of decarbonization policy. They didn't get any carbon tax or cap and trade. They're making billions of dollars in incentives to build green energy. And all they have to do is do a little net metering for residential solar. And they should just suck it up. Because if they kill the residential solar industry because they don't want to have to do whatever to play their part in it, then something worse can be coming down the pike, right? Then maybe they should be careful what they wish for because this is like the least bad option for them is that, oh, you have to do some net metering for residential solar. We didn't do cap and trade carbon taxes or whatever, so be thankful for that. Right? So that's why I have no sympathy for them whatsoever. They're getting all the great options in terms of incentivizing green energy and none of the bad options. And the other thing is the residential solar thing. Yes. So here's one more fact I didn't mention, which I think is salient. They have a monopoly. They have a monopoly. They're a utility. The other option, by the way, is we nationalize the electricity utility. How about that? I'm sure they don't want us to do that either.
C: Didn't somebody in one of their emails, because as you mentioned at the top of this, you've got a lot of emails about this. Didn't one person go on some kind of tear about how they're not a monopoly?
S: I have one utility company I can get my electricity from.
C: That's what I said. I can't even remember the email right now, but it was a lot of like...
S: I think that was the email about it's actually different companies at different segments of it buying...
E: The middle people, right?
C: That doesn't affect me. I only have one choice.
S: As a customer, I have one company. Who I looked it up, by the way, they made $500 million last year. So again, they're doing just fine.
E: Is that net?
S: Yes, that was their profit last year. But anyway, so we're not nationalizing their industry. We're not taxing the carbon their business is releasing into the atmosphere. We're giving them boatloads of money to invest in new infrastructure. And private citizens and companies are investing for them and it's making their job easier. And not only that, Connecticut and other states, and this should be national, but at least on the state level, they have another incentive. They're now incentivizing getting battery backups. I could get a huge incentive from the government to pay to help defray the cost of a battery backup system. If I let the utility company use it as grid storage. So now we're paying for their grid storage too, which is going to make solar even better. It's going to stabilize the grid even more and reduce their need to dip into more expensive, dirtier energy to cover peak demand. I mean, they're getting everything they want. You know what I mean? And they're whining about having a little bit of competition. Come on. Right? Am I wrong here? Am I wrong here?
C: No.
E: No. I don't think so.
C: But why were so many people so mad when they wrote us those emails?
S: I don't know. Because I think—
C: Do they all work for the energy companies?
S: A lot of them do.
E: Oops.
S: They basically said they work in the industry. So they're looking at it from an industry perspective. And I've dealt with people from the industry before, people that I've been in long-term conversations with about this. And yes, they have a very particular perspective that's very industry-centric. And yes, I'm coming at it from a residential energy user, but also as a science communicator and a skeptic. And I'm willing to be fair, and I want the system to work. And again, the most important thing is that we transition as quickly as possible. Right? We've got to keep that in mind as well. This is not just about how we're fairly spreading out the cost here. It's also we're trying to incentivize making a rapid transition as possible to low carbon energy.
E: And gosh, we haven't even touched on things like the demand. The demand is going to go bonkers in the next 10 to 20 years.
S: Demand for what, for solar?
E: The demand for energy overall.
S: By 2050, it's probably going to increase by 50% from where we are now. And it might be worse.
E: And where's that coming from, right? Right. So you have to have these other sources of energy in place.
S: You're going to have to. That's right. We're going to need to do everything.
E: You have to. You have to have it all.
S: We're going to have to build nuclear.
E: Nuclear has to be on the table.
S: We're going to have... And China's kicking our ass. They are kicking our ass with nuclear and with solar.
E: And coal.
S: Yeah. But yes, you're right. But remember, we talked about this years ago. Their plan was just to build out their energy infrastructure until 2050 and then decarbonize.
E: But at least they're doing so.
S: But they're like 13 years ahead of schedule. They're like way ahead of schedule. They're building more solar than the rest of the world combined. They are just massively investing in solar. Part of it is because it's selfish. They're trying to capture the market.
E: Sure.
S: They're trying to own the technology of the 21st century. That's their stated goal. But at least the side effect is they're building a lot of solar. And they're flooding the market with cheap solar panels.
E: And they're going to flood the market with cheap electric cars as well soon.
S: They're doing that. They're already doing that. They're already doing that. And they're going to also produce more electric cars than anybody else in the world.
E: Right.
C: But the thing is, we could be doing that.
S: We could be doing that, too. Absolutely. That's why we need to invest in these energy sectors. Absolutely. And we're doing that under the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIP Act, all these things. We are doing that. And there are plans, there are bills in process to do that for nuclear as well, in addition to what happened under the IRA. But it just needs to be about 10 times as much is what we're doing now. It just means you weigh way more of it. And the industry better play ball, right? Because they have a sweetheart deal right now, really, in every way. And you know, whining about, oh, we're losing to some residential solar companies. Come on, you whine about that and just see what the other options are. All right, let's move on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:28:30)[edit]
Theme: Extinct Birds
Item #1: Pelagornis sandersi was the largest flying bird to ever live, with a wingspan of 6.4 meters, more than twice as long as a modern albatross.[6]
Item #2: Kelenken guillermoi, a member of the terror bird family of South America, is the largest bird to have ever lived, at up to 10 feet tall and 350 kg.[7]
Item #3: Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-sized human cousins, shared the island of Flores with a giant meat-eating stork that would have towered over them at 6 feet tall.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is extinct birds.
J: No chance.
S: You have a one in three chance even.
E: Again, not no chance.
S: All right, here we go. Pelagornis sandersi was the largest flying bird to ever live, with a wingspan of 6.4 meters, more than twice as long as a modern albatross. Item number two, Kelenken guillermoi, a member of the terror bird family of South America, is the largest bird to have ever lived, at up to 10 feet tall and 350 kilograms. And item number three, Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-sized human cousins, shared the island of Flores with a giant meat-eating stork that would have towered over them at six feet tall. Cara, go first.
C: I don't know. I'm like, what? These are so like, what? Okay. 6.4 meters, twice as long as an, yeah, sure. There's something twice as big as something now that's dead. Not dead, but extinct. I guess also dead. The Terror Bird family of South America. Ten feet tall? That's really tall. 350 kilograms. That's also really big. And then Homo floresiensis had a meat-eating stork friend, not friend, a meat-eating stork foe. Towered over was six feet tall. Do you remember how tall Homo floresiensis was?
S: They were hobbit-sized.
C: I don't know what hobbit-sized is.
S: They were like four feet, half length, yeah, four feet short.
C: Three, four, something like that. Okay. What up, Stork? I want that one to be true. So that one's true.
E: A little larger than a gnome, maybe.
C: Okay, thank you. Helpful. So I think the one that's- I'm just, this is so stupid. I want that to be true. And so I'm just going to make this fun and say that's true. So it's between the other two. And it seems like a 6.4 meter wingspan is more reasonable than a 10 foot height and 350 kilogram weight. So I'm going to say that the Kelenken guillermoi is the fiction.
S: It's probably Guillermoi.
C: Guillermoi? Yeah, you're right. It's probably not Guillermoi.
E: Guillermoi.
S: Guillermoi. Okay, Jay.
J: Okay, the Hobbit-sized human cousins. I think that one is science. The second one, the Kalenkin Guillermoi. Guillermoi. A member of the General Guillermoi family of South America. It's the largest bird that ever lived.
E: Guillermoi. Benicio del Guillermo.
C: Did you say del taco?
J: Ten feet tall, huh? I don't think so. I think that's fiction.
S: Okay. And Evan.
E: Ten feet tall is – yeah, that's a tough one. For a bird and boy, 350K, that clearly – I mean – all right. I think it's fiction as well. However, if it turns out to be science and if you're going to tell me this thing flew, oh my gosh, forget that. That would be like a plane in the sky basically is what it would appear to be. But no, I don't think that's true. I think we're all on the same page here.
S: OK, so I'm going to take this in reverse order. We'll start with number three. Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-sized human cousin, shared the island of Flores with a giant meat-eating stork that would have towered over them at six feet tall. You guys all want this to be and think this one is science.
E: Well, everything towers over anything hobbit-sized.
S: And this one is science. This is science. So yeah, those guys, man, those little hobbits on Flores, they had to live not only with these giant meat-eating storks, but like rats that would have been as big as dogs to them. Because there's island dwarfism and island gigantism, things sort of tend towards the middle, so like little things get bigger, big things, so they were like little, there weren't little elephants, but you know, in some places you get these mini versions of things and giant versions of other things. But this stork was a giant version of a stork. Yeah, I think it was huge.
E: And they knew it ate meat? Well, when did it go extinct?
S: They knew it was meat eating.
C: Well, storks eat fish.
S: So it was contemporary to Homo floresiensis. They existed at the same time.
E: Is fish considered meat in this description?
C: Fish is meat.
S: Yeah, I think they ate mammals.
C: Oh, wow. So not just fish.
E: And giant rats.
C: And hobbits.
S: Yeah, maybe they ate the giant rats. But you've got to imagine a hobbit with a spear fighting one of these things, right?
E: Oh, absolutely. That is a page right out of a D&D book.
S: All right, let's go back to number two. Kelenken guillermoi, a member of the terror bird family of South America, is the largest bird to have ever lived at up to 10 feet tall and 350 kilograms. You guys all think that's just too big. Well, I got news for you. That bird existed and it was 10 feet tall and 350 kilograms.
E: But it wasn't the biggest.
S: But it wasn't the biggest.
C: So there's something even bigger than that?
S: Yes, there was something even bigger than that. There was the elephant bird.
C: Of course there was an elephant bird.
S: From Madagascar.
E: I remember that movie.
S: Standing also 10 feet tall, but weighing up to 1,700 pounds.
J: What did that look like?
S: Although I just mixed pounds and kilograms. That would be 770 kilograms, so weighed twice as much.
C: What was it called again?
S: The Elephant Bird of Madagascar.
C: It's flightless, Ev.
S: These are all flightless.
C: It looks like an ostrich.
S: And there's another bird that's also bigger than the Terror bird. The Terror bird's not even number two. This one was from Australia, and it, for a time, beat out the elephant bird, but then they found bigger ones, and eventually the elephant bird regained its crown as the biggest bird ever.
C: This is another case of right for the wrong reasons.
E: Okay, so why do birds or why did birds achieve these heights?
S: They basically were dinosaurs. These things were, they were carnivores. They were predators. These things would run around killing and eating mammals with their giant heavy beak.
C: Well, even right now, like how tall is an emu or an ostrich or a cassowary?
S: Not 10 feet. Yeah, they're like six feet. They're like six feet.
J: Yeah, that's big too, man. Yeah, they're big too.
S: So Pelagornis sandrasi was the largest flying bird to ever live with a wingspan of 6.4 meters more than twice as long as modern albatross is science. That thing was a monster. When you say twice the wingspan, you think, OK, he's twice as big. But when you imagine that the actual whole bird, when you double one dimension like that, the overall size of the bird was massive. This was a monster. And he had pseudo teeth. Basically, his bill evolved bony points that were functioned as teeth. They weren't true teeth. So this thing, that was to pick fish out of the ocean. Although, they think it was too heavy to either land or take off from the water. So it would have to, I guess, capture them on the wing, and then it could only land on land. The thing was huge. You see it next to the silhouette of an albatross. The thing was a monster. Yep, but you guys all were right for the wrong reason.
C: Yay!
E: Oh, well, okay.
S: Even bigger than the terror bird.
C: I'll take it.
S: She was. The elephant bird of Madagascar.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:37:27)[edit]
"Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things."
– Thomas Carlyle, (description of author)
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.
E: "Quackery gives birth to nothing, gives death to all things." Thomas Carlyle, who was a, what, Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher. Born in 1795, died 1881. Talking about quack. He was calling out the quacks back then.
S: Yeah, absolutely. And it's true. There was a good book called The Health Robbers, which I think was published by Prometheus, which basically was premised on that same point that quack quacks and charlatans and alternative medicine proponents, whatever they, that's what they do. They steal your health in exchange for taking your money. And here's the other thing. I often point this out to people. Back in the 90s, when alternative medicine was really on the steep part of the curve, people are like, well, it hasn't been studied. It wasn't really true. It was not really true at that time, but I could see how somebody might say that. We have to look into it. Here we are 20, 30 years later, and what has it produced? Absolutely nothing. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars at the NIH studying alternative medicine, And none of the modalities have been shown to be effective. None of them. It's produced absolutely nothing. Just wasted a lot of money, wasted a lot of time, wasted a lot of people's health. That's it. Because you know why? If any of these things worked, they wouldn't need a special category.
E: They would be medicine.
S: They would be medicine. They wouldn't need this special kindergarten category of special favours or whatever.
E: Alternative, complementary, integrative.
S: It's all BS. I obviously have strong opinions about things this week.
E: That's good.
C: Steve's mad. I like it when Steve's mad.
E: Absolutely. We learn more things when Steve gets mad.
S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
J: You're welcome, brother.
C: Thanks Steve.
E: Thanks, everyone. And hello to Bob.
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ www.sciencealert.com: Earth Welcomes a New 'Mini-Moon' Later This Month : ScienceAlert
- ↑ www.livescience.com: What is the dead internet conspiracy?
- ↑ phys.org: New kit makes classroom CRISPR experiments affordable and accessible
- ↑ www.globenewswire.com: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Market Size to Reach
- ↑ sciencebasedmedicine.org: Why Is ADHD On The Rise
- ↑ www.sci.new: None
- ↑ royalsocietypublishing.org: None
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: Leptoptilos robustus - Wikipedia