SGU Episode 1000

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SGU Episode 💥✨ 1000! ✨💥
September 7th 2024
Celebrating 1000 episodes of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, recorded live in Chicago
SGU 999                      SGU 1001
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
G: George Hrab
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Introduction, 1000th episode!

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. (applause) Today is Sunday, August 18^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella (applause). Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody! (applause)

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy. (applause)

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys. (applause)

S: Evan Bernstein... (applause)

E: Hello Chicago! (applause)

S: ...and George Hrab.

G: Chicago, Chicago. (applause)

S: We are live from Chicago doing counter-programming to the DNC.

G: You do the best programming. Our podcast is the best podcast.

S: Ever. In the history of podcasting.

G: It's the most podcast ever recorded ever by anyone ever.

S: This recording is the 1,000th episode of the SGU. (applause) I mean, seriously, did you guys imagine we would be here like almost 20 years later, we started doing this show, like, hey, let's do a podcast, that we would be sitting here doing our 1,000th episode in front of a few people. There's a couple people in the audience who came out to see us. What do you think?

J: I mean, what can you, it's over, all of it is overwhelming like, as we've been building up to this, like a couple years ago, we started talking about, oh my God, we are like, we are.

S: Yeah, it sort of like dawned on us, like, yeah, in a couple years, we're going to be up to 1,000. We should do something for that.

J: And we can't, all of us collectively can't help but look back and think about it, like, this is scheduled for us. We do this on Wednesday nights, we record, we talk to each other and then it's over and we go on-

S: For you it's over, for me it's beginning, post-production.

J: The power of the, of this 1,000th episode realization, right, there's a lot, there's a lot of emotion here. It's not, this isn't really about science, right, it isn't like a scientific.

S: It's partly about science.

J: The show is about science, but the thing that we, that we set out to do when we started this show was to help people, to educate people, to change their lives.

S: Critical thinking, scientific literacy, and then along the way we picked up media savvy as well as sort of a, those are the three legs of the stool, basically.

J: You completely missed what I was trying to say.

S: Go ahead. Just clarifying.

J: Yeah, no, I hear you. But the impact that we have.

S: It's about community.

J: We have people that have decided to come watch us record this show, not because they like, they want to hear you talk more about the brain, it's more about they want to be a part of the SGU community, they want to it's a human interaction.

S: Jay, it's a hundred percent because they want to hear me talk about the brain.

J: Can we agree to disagree?

S: No. But seriously, I hear what you're saying. Obviously, it's about community as well and that, because we started out as a skeptical organization, right? As a community. Before we were a podcast, it was all about just networking with other people who were skeptical and wanted to promote that and we wrote articles and whatever, but that was window dressing. It was the physical interaction that you, when we did the podcast, it's because we wanted to reach beyond our 200 people in Connecticut, you know what I mean? Like to be, to take advantage of this new newfangled thing called social media to see if we could reach more people. And I think it worked. Experiment successful.

B: But we're done now, right? A thousand, right? Can I relax? Wednesday nights. Can I just relax and, right?

J: We've talked about this. I mean, it's a, it's a hard thing to think about.

S: We've been renewed for another thousand episodes.

E: Yeah, we all signed contracts. (applause)

J: The next 20 years are going to be very hard, right? We're going to all become very old.

G: Well, here's the question. Here's the question. So there's like tons of bands that tour nowadays where there's no original members of that band, right? So like you see the Dubey brothers and it's like one guy, or it's like you see Foghat and it's the roadie of the cousin who used to carry the bass guitar and that's Foghat. Do you ever see like the Skeptics Guide of the Universe being a bunch of other people that like somehow kind of will, will cycle their way in. And this will be like the, like the symphony orchestra of skeptical podcasts.

S: We've been asked that question. Funny, you should mention it, George. No, we've been asked that question. And like we got this one email like a couple of months ago, somebody was like, so you know, you guys are getting pretty up there and I'm like starting to get worried, like what's going to happen? And do you guys have like younger people that are ready to take over for you? You know, like when you know when you die so well, first of all, the thing I like about podcasting is I could totally see myself doing this at 80. Why not? Right? Because I'm sitting at home in front of my computer.

G: Talking to the machine.

E: Hello. Is this thing on?

S: As long as my voice holds up and I don't get demented and whatever, like, which can happen, but there's well.

J: If you get demented, we'll run you for president.

S: Yeah. That's true. (applause)

J: And I don't care what political party you belong to, but that's fucking funny.

S: But part, it's always been our mission even before the podcast to be a conduit for people who want to contribute to the skeptical community. And this is partly why we collaborate with so many people. It's like, it's not just about us. It's about getting as many voices into this as possible. So one idea that I've sort of run by these guys where you haven't really settled on anything, but I really want to move forward with is to start nurturing a younger generation of skeptical podcasters. And so what I want to do is to work with what we call skeptical correspondents or SGU correspondents. So these would be somebody who, for example, would record a five minute science news item, pick a news item, just record yourself five minutes. And you, if it's good, we will include it in the show and you'll become a SGU correspondent. And we obviously want to look for, first of all, because as has been pointed out to us a couple of times, we're mostly old white guys up here on the stage and mostly, mostly. And and we know that we want to, we want to have a diversity of perspectives, a diversity of voices and everything, because that's just good. It's good intellectually. You know, we, yes, we have a certain synergy, but we're acutely aware of like the massive overlap in our life experience, our cultural experience and whatever. So this would be a way of bringing in a greater diversity, a greater range of voices as well, you know? So, yeah. So, so we're going to do that and it's going to start with just people submitting, no promises, just, it's like, it's like anything.

G: And they'll slowly vote you out and then just kind of get rid of you.

S: Well, you never know what, it's just I do, and we, and over the years, and this is how this happened at the last NOTACON is happens every time we are in a room with people like there's somebody who comes up to me like a 19 year old plucky person. I want to get into science communication, whatever. And we're like, absolutely. We want to help you do that.

G: Don't even bother kid. Listen to me. Trust me.

S: Get away from me kid. You're bothering me.

G: You don't want to get in this business brother. There's one thing I got to tell you, stay out of this skeptic game. I used to be able to sing and look at myself in the morning, not anymore brother, not anymore.

B: Steve, I like, that's a good idea, but I got a better one. We could go forward us essentially for decades or centuries as uploaded AI constructs. I liked it. I liked that idea. I mean-

C: But when you do that, you end up, with three arms.

B: That could be a bonus. I like that.

S: It's a feature not a bug, Cara.

J: We don't know what the, what AI is going to do. Like we like to speculate and talk about it. But the bottom line is right now we're all alive. We're human. Let's stay human. And I wanted to record the show for as long as, like you said, Steve, for as long as we can do it, I'd like to do it. And I totally love the concept of bringing in some new people and we could do a slow transition to let a new group of people take over.

S: The real question is, and this is the question you're asking George, right? Is the SGU us or is the SGU a legacy that is more than us?

G: Right. An idea.

S: Right. Is it more of an idea? And that's a hard question to answer because it's only been us with little iteration. And so I don't know what the answer to that question is, but it's very, it's interesting. And then certainly I like the idea of the SGU being a legacy that survives beyond me and beyond us. It obviously won't be the same, right? It can't be, but it, but nothing's ever going to be the same.

G: You can say that the iterations though have made the show stronger and better, I would say. So that's a good sign, that making changes because you are cognizant making changes, not just for change sake, but just because they could really make a difference.

S: Very strategically made changes. I mean we've talked about the fact that when we brought Cara on, there was a, we spent six months making that decision and it was very strategic, meaning we wanted somebody who was going to bring something awesome to the show. And she did and we were very happy with that. It exceeded our expectations, but that was like very deliberate. It wasn't just like an accident, like, hey, it wasn't a whim. You know, it was like the show needs this kind of voice. She's perfect. Let's bring her on and make the show better. And that's what happened.

G: So are you taking like applications now or what's the, what's the process? No, if people are interested, I mean, if there's young people listening.

S: This was the announcement. If you want to, this is something you feel like you're interested in doing, and I have spoken to some specific people about this already that obviously I know personally already, but you know, send in a clip it will give you feedback. We may or may not use it, but we want to develop a relationship with like two or three people who like maybe once a few weeks or something, we include a clip into the show. And that's just like another perspective. Somebody from Australia or somebody, whatever, from a completely different perspective with a different expertise. That's the other thing. When we were like thinking about like, who would we bring on the show? It's also about, well, we need, we might as well try to bring in somebody who has some expertise of their own that's compliments what we already have on the show. So it's not just about diversity of background and perspective. It's also diversity of expertise because like there was talk about so many things on the show and obviously we go wait as science journalists we get to topics where we have no topic expertise. So we have to rely upon our journalistic expertise, which is tricky. It's really hard. And it's always nice to have somebody with actual topic expertise, which is why, we also like to partner with people like say Brian Wecht, who we were talking about just before we started the show, who's like, oh, a physicist, an actual physicist they probably have some topic expertise on physics that we don't have, you know? So anyway, this is all, I think, also part of what I think of as the legacy of the show. But we don't know what the future brings, but we had no point in the last 20 years do we get to the point where like, let's just keep doing exactly what we're doing. And you know what I mean? And not even think about changing. It's always about what's the next thing? What's the next thing? What are we, what are we not doing now that we should be doing, you know?

G: There are very few examples of things that last for decades and that don't iterate and don't change over time. Their essence might be the same and they might be similar or whatever, but yeah, but you have to be able to modify and so, and which you guys are doing, you know.

S: We're trying.

G: Yeah. Yeah.

S: All right. So we are going to do some actual meaty content. We're not just going to talk about ourselves for an hour and a half. As exciting as that would be.

"Looking Back" News Items (12:52)

S: My task for the rogues was, so we're going to, obviously this is a bit of a retrospective show, but we're not just going to do the best of clips or whatever we are going to do is rather than just doing like, here's a one narrow news item that's happening right now. We wanted to take a look at the arc of some of the topics that we've covered over the last 20 years and sort of give a, a look back about that topic. And it's also, it's a little bit of a victory lap in that it's, where it's like 20 years ago, this is what topic that we were confronting and this is what the true believers had to say about it. The deniers had to say about this is what the skeptics had to say about it. Let's look back and see what's happened over the last 20 years to see. I don't want to say who was right, but you get the idea.

E: How it panned out. Yeah.

J: We could cherry pick it and make it look like we're very smart.

S: We could cherry pick a lot to cherry pick, but anyway, these are topics that I think, we should cover.

Global Warming (13:54)

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S: So I'm going to start and I'm going to talk about global warming because global warming has one of the biggest topics that we have covered for the last 20 years. Right at the beginning of our entry into skepticism, certainly podcasting. This was a big topic. And it has been a fairly active and dynamic topic over the last 20 years. Here's a graph of the changing average surface temperatures of the earth going back to 1880, but you could look at the last 2000 to 2020, basically the period of time that we've been podcasting. There's a pretty steep curve up of the of temperatures. But I'm going to go back a little bit further and talk about a climate change denial timeline. Here we go. 1896, this is how far back it goes. 1896, Cervantes Arrhenius predicted that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that it would cause the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere would warm the atmosphere because it traps, reflected heat, et cetera. And it was sort of reaching equilibrium point that depends on how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere. So we knew about this going back to 1896. In 1938, another scientist, Guy Callender, said that CO2 that were, that is not just CO2, but the CO2 that's being released into the atmosphere will cause global warming, right? So it's not just that this is part of geology, this is actually something that's happening in the world. So again, going back to 1938, we knew. We knew this was happening. In the 1950s, the fossil fuel industry was warned that burning their product, fossil fuels, releases CO2 into the atmosphere, causes global warming, and can potentially be significantly harmful. In 1970, Shell and BP, these are two fossil fuel companies, funded climate research. But they didn't just say, we're going to fund climate research. They specifically funded scientists to push against the mainstream, the emerging mainstream scientific opinion that man-made CO2 was causing global climate change. This is basically the beginning of a well-financed campaign of science denial meant to cause uncertainty and doubt about the effects of burning fossil fuels on the climate. In 1981, Exxon was warned that CO2 emissions not only are warming the planet, but the results could be, quote unquote, catastrophic. These are all documented from internal records, et cetera.

J: So Exxon actually said that themselves?

S: This is their own internal documentation.

J: That didn't get out?

S: It's out now, but yes, at the time, but yes, so they knew that fossil fuel was causing global warming. They were told by scientists it's going to be catastrophic. Esentially their response was, let's fund scientists to give us a different answer.

E: This sounds like when the tobacco companies did. They hired scientists, right? And they buried the evidence that the scientists found.

S: Interesting, you mentioned the tobacco industry, Edmund. We'll get to that. 1985, Carl Sagan testified to Congress about anthropogenic global warming. So this is when it really, for me, that's when it really became like, oh, this is an issue. I remember that was the first I heard about it was from Carl Sagan, just outlining we're burning fossil fuel, we're releasing CO2, it's warming the planet. This is not sustainable. We have to, we need another way.

J: For me, it was An Inconvenient Truth when that documentary came out.

S: Yeah, that was a, that was a big part of it too.

B: Steve, was there any sense though, that this was something, this wasn't something that would really manifest in 300 years, but a generation late?

S: I think that, yeah, so I think that's when An Inconvenient Truth came out. It was like, this is not something theoretical for 300 years from now. This is going to be happening in the lifetime of people who are alive today. 1989, the Global Climate Coalition, this is a coalition of fossil fuel companies who banded together to push back against the narrative of HEW. Now Evan, these two guys, Seitz and Singer, are scientists who were hired by the fossil fuel industry to dispute anthropogenic global warming. They're the same two guys who were hired by the tobacco industry to sow doubt about the causes of cancer. It's the same actual guys, right? Not just the same strategy of, are we going to hire experts to come up with a specific answer that's favorable to our industry? It's literally the same people.

J: When you zoom out on that, like you know that the people that worked for Exxon or that coalition that they came up with, this is what the conversation was like, George, play with me for a second. So they're going to we've got a problem here. We need help. We need to figure out how to do this. What do we got?

G: I know a guy.

J: Is he a scientist? Will he do what we tell him to do?

G: Oh yeah.

J: All right, call him, give him a million dollars, and then let's go on vacation.

G: Done boss.

S: So these were hired guns, right? This is like the very definition of a hired gun. You guys remember the global warming pause? Remember that term? 1998 to 2013, it was never real. But this is sort of, now we're getting to the period of time when we were active in skepticism and when the podcast was starting, it was right in the middle of when the, what I would call global warming deniers were saying, oh, global warming is not actually even happening. It's all just, this is just the natural fluctuation in temperature and the climate. Who knows? It could be driven by solar activity or we're just sort of recovering from the mini ice age in the middle ages still. And in fact, global warming hasn't even happened for the last 16 years. There's really two ways in which they created that false narrative. I mean, they're both just lying, but I mean, there are two sort of strategies. One was, so they cherry picked as their starting point a high point in the natural short-term fluctuation of climate change, right? It was an El Nino, it was like a strong El Nino year where it was, this was 1997. 1997 was a particularly hot year. And then if you look at the following 10 to 15 years, it's still, there's still this trend if you ignore that artificially cherry picked high starting point, but you can kind of create, graphically create this illusion that there was no warming over the last 15 years. So, and they said, see, it's not even really happening anymore. Now the other thing is that it's, so they cherry picked their starting point, but they also cherry picked a short run of temperature. The climate scientists use a 30 year horizon in order to, they're constantly looking over averaging temperatures over 30 years in order to produce like a statistical trend in the climate. It takes 30 years for it to become statistically significant, is one way to look at it. Which means if you ever look at a 10 year period, there's not going to be any significant change by definition. It just hasn't been enough time for the statistics to play itself out. So you can always say it's not currently warming, right? You could always say, statistically speaking there hasn't been, yeah, of course, because it's a 30 year freaking trend. You can't look at over 10 years. So for those two reasons, the pause was always BS, like it was never real. And so what were the the people who did not believe in global warming or were paid not to believe in it or whatever you think about it, the people who were doubtful of anthropogenic global warming, what were they saying in 2005 when we started the podcast? Like, well, it's not really happening, we're in a pause. The pause really is so this is all just natural fluctuation that will regress to the mean and over the next 10 to 20 years, temperatures are going to settle back down to where they were in the 1980s, 1990s, right? That's what they were predicting. That's what they were saying. Here we are, 2024. The last 10 years are the hottest 10 years on record. If you go, you guys all know the hockey stick, right? Michael Mann's hockey stick. We've had Michael Mann on the show a couple of times. Here it is. I'm showing you a graph. This is just the end point of it where temperatures are pretty flat over centuries and then in the last 30, 40, 50 years, they curve up like the blade of a hockey stick, right? This has been replicated over and over and over again from multiple, multiple different independent sources of information and it's really undeniable now that the predictions of people who were saying that AGW was happening are correct. And in fact, I remember like in 2010, there were skeptics who made a public offer, like a wager so to climate sign, to climate deniers, it's like, go ahead then. Make your prediction for the next 10 years, right? And we'll make our prediction for the next 10 years and we'll see who's right. And nobody bit, right? Because they knew that they were going to lose. And of course, the scientists were correct because it is happening, right? Anthropogenic global warming is happening.

G: What was your viewpoint in 2005 when the show started? Where were you on that?

S: Oh, so, all right. So we were totally on board with AGW except for Perry, right? Because Perry, this was his bias, right? And he and I fought about this, right? I mean, personally fought about this. And he'd never liked it when I destroyed his arguments, right? Yeah. No, he didn't like that at all.

J: None of us do, Steve.

S: Yeah.

E: But it wasn't like Perry was an outlier either. There were others in the skeptical community that also shared the same view.

G: Yeah. That's why I was wondering.

S: There were others in the skeptical community, all libertarians, that also doubted global warming. And so Perry was sort of in that crowd. And I always wonder, because again, he died before I had a chance to find out, how long would it have taken for me to really bring him around? We don't know, unfortunately.

G: What was his main argument? The 10-year-long argument?

S: It's whatever the arguments were floating around at the time. They were never good.

C: Normal fluctuation. Volcanoes. Yeah.

G: It was cold yesterday.

S: Not that stupid.

C: Snowball. Yeah.

S: And the thing is, here's the thing about global warming, right? And we talk about this just as science communication strategists, right? How do you address, how do you change people's minds when they believe something that's not scientifically valid, not scientifically true? And the answer is, it depends on what the topic is, right? This is something that we learned. You know, 1995, Carl Sagan would say, it's an information deficit problem, right? People believe pseudoscience in direct proportion to their ignorance of actual science. That's like almost an exact quote from Carl Sagan. And it turns out that that's not true most of the time. It is true for some topics, like GMOs. Global warming is at one end of the spectrum, where people who deny global warming know more about climate science than the average person, and sometimes more than the people that are debating them from the scientific point of view, like if they're just other journalists, not experts, right? And giving them information has no effect on their belief. In fact, if anything, they're the one group where there's some evidence where they might dig in their heels. So this is, which is I think a way of saying that global warming denial is a sophisticated pseudoscience. They have, because they're spending millions of dollars hiring scientists to fund an industry of denial. So yes, of course they have sophisticated arguments. They're bought and paid for.

C: Yeah. And there's good motivated reasoning for them. It's an industry that they need to protect. I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar industry, and they don't want to lose their profits.

S: Right, right. They want to, their literal strategy is to delay this until they can get all of their assets out of the ground, right? That's their goal. They don't want to shut down fossil fuel until they've capitalized on all of their assets. That's it. That's their goal. And they're, you know what? They're freaking winning. They are winning. It's working. They have success. We're producing more fossil fuel. We're burning more fossil fuel now than we ever have. We haven't even turned the ship around yet. You know, we talk often about how long is it going to take to get to net zero, whatever. We haven't even turned a corner yet. We're still going up. It's amazing. It's disheartening. But I do think the conversation has turned around, but it hasn't yet had an impact on the actual reality yet. Because it's not easy. We are asking a lot. We collectively, people are saying, we've got to fix global warming. It's not a quick fix. We have to turn around multiple industries with a massive amount of momentum. We are trying to change civilization. We get it. It's not easy.

J: And the disinformation that is spread is convincing people that the grid is never going to be able to handle electric cars. Electric cars are horrible to produce because of all the chemicals that they use. Even other industries that are tangential to this, they're discrediting them. They circulate these images online of somebody had a diesel generator running a machine to put power into their electric car. Yeah, some idiot did that somewhere. That's not what's happening. So the real problem is that this is politically motivated.

S: Of course. There's no doubt about that.

C: And it follows, as we'll probably continue to see throughout the show today, it follows this very classic course of adjusting and adapting the rhetoric for a more sophisticated audience. Because I think it's quite rare now to see people who are just flat out deniers. I think most of the people you see is go, okay, well, yeah, maybe it is. Okay. We can't deny this getting warmer, but it's not anthropogenic.

S: Or it is, but how do we know it's bad?

C: But you're talking about sinking all this money into something that we don't even know if it's going to work. So there's always the goalpost continues to move. But the core argument, which is, I need to keep doing what I've been doing.

S: But it's always a tell, right? And it's the same thing with the anti-vaccine community as well. It's like, no matter what the argument, no matter what the line of attack, it's always, the answer's always the same. Do nothing. Or with the anti-vaccine movement, it's always the same answer. It's the vaccines. It's always the vaccines.

C: Which is also a do nothing. It's like, don't get vaccinated. That's the do nothing aswer.

S: But again, the fossil fuel industry is like, do nothing until we get all of our oil out of the ground and then we'll be dead and we don't care. So yeah, no matter what the argument is, it's always the same. So that's how you know it's motivated reasoning, because the end result is always the same. All right. We're going to move on.

Solar Panels (29:31)

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S: And this is sort of a related topic. Jay, you're going to talk about our coverage of solar panels over the last 20 years.

J: I picked solar collection, solar panels, I wanted to talk about. First I want to talk about when we first talked about it as kind of like a marker of what was going on in the news at that time and everything. So I, a listener of the show, who's one of our patrons, built some free software for us that lets us textually search the podcast now. Wow. And we're going to roll this out to everyone eventually until Ian and I have been talking about like how to make it better and how to give it a little bit more user interface reliability and everything, but I used it a lot and it's pretty damn cool. So I'm curious, Steve, when do you think, don't look at my screen, when do you think, what year, what episode did we first, first, first talk about solar panels?

S: I don't remember, but I would guess it was early, early on. My memory is like sometime around 2000, between 2005 and 2007, we talked about solar panels and at the time the efficiency was at about 12%.

J: That's damn close, man. Steve's brain is awesome. 2008, episode 135, Steve, Steve talked about it and he said, it's not quite at the breakout level in terms of cost effectiveness, but it's interesting that they didn't say that they didn't make solar energy more efficient. They said, make it affordable, and I think that's right. Right now, the efficiency for commercial solar panels is around 12% in terms of the amount of solar energy that's converted to electricity. So I have a couple of interesting things here about the snapshot of what did people who believed in it or were saying, hey, this is an interesting thing, what were they saying? And then what were the cynics saying? So the people who were supporting it were saying that, first off, there was an increased and growing interest in renewable energy. More and more people were hearing about it and were finding it compelling. They were saying solar energy is going to be a crucial component of future energy. It's going to be heavy in the mix. There was awareness and politicians were changing their rhetoric about it. There were some technological advancements that were happening back around 2008. There was an increase in efficiency happening. It wasn't a lot, but the people were seeing reports of it happening and a decrease in cost and those two things always match each other. Increase in efficiency, lower cost, always. There was government support via incentives like tax credits and subsidies. And people were beginning to talk about energy independence and the environmental benefits. All again, just keep in mind, very beginning of the talks about this stuff. Not that long ago, 2008. The cynics were saying, look, it's way too expensive and that right there, it's a deal killer. Not thinking, well, yeah, it needs to progress. The technology is not going to tomorrow all of a sudden be above the waterline. Investments need to happen. They also were saying that the efficiency and reliability were not there at all. The reliability of the technology and being able to get it into the grid and all that stuff. Yeah, it really wasn't there back in 2008. They were correct, but it wasn't something to say that would make you not want to invest the money and keep pushing the technology. They thought that the solar industry was too dependent on government subsidies. And you know what? Back then it was. And I think that's fine because the governments are there to create new industries and put money into programs that in the future will pay off. They were saying that it will never be able to compete with coal, gas, and nuke. And they were wrong. They also said that the grid integration is going to be too difficult. It's going to be too costly to take on. And unfortunately, that's true today. It's very expensive.

S: But you have to put it into perspective because whenever I get into conversations with people about solar, I often find that there's this dichotomy. It's like, well, it won't work at 100%, therefore it's worthless. It's like, well, OK, but it could work at 30%. All of these problems only really start to kick in when you get north of, I don't know, 30%, 40% penetration. Then you could argue about that. But there isn't really a grid problem until we get to 30% or so. And we are nowhere near that. So we have a lot of room to expand. And obviously, we could then expand the grid as we're doing it so that we can keep ahead of it.

J: We just need to do it, though. Just need to do it. Slow and steady. That's fine. We're never going to have like this. We're going to rewire the United States. It's not going to happen. We've got to make these solid incremental technological increases to do it. So I thought that I would just go into a little detail about comparing 2004 to 2024, just to give you guys some figures and ideas of where it's come from. And just as a quick aside, humans using solar energy is ancient. We've been using the sun to do lots of things. If you look at the history of it, it's fascinating because the sun has always been a source of energy to humans. A thousand years ago, they were doing things that the sun was a crucial part of, even like curing meats and food and all that stuff. So modern times, us shifting into using the sun for energy is obvious as hell. We've known about this for 50, 60 years.Scientists were talking about using the sun as a source of energy. So anyway, 2004, average solar panel efficiency was around 12% to 15%. And of course, this means that 12% to 15% of the sunlight that hits the solar panels was actually being converted into electricity. In 2024, does anybody have an idea where it is? Somebody raise your hand quick. I'll pick somebody. Correct. 22. 22 to 25. You both win. Very good. We have a laboratory prototypes right now reaching 29%. We can essentially they're coming up with better methods to trap the sunlight and to turn it into energy. The cost, let's talk about cost now. So back in 2004, the cost for solar panels was approximately $5 to $7 per watt. I know it's a little hard for most of us to understand like watts and how many watts of each panel or whatever, but let's just use watts in that dollar figure to compare panels back then to today. So $5 to $7 per watt back then. And today we are at? Anybody? 50 cents is the figure that I found. You said 20 cents. All right. That's really good actually. I hope you're right and my figure is wrong here.

G: It's like a bad Evident Costello thing. It's like four cents per watt. Per watt, you tell me.

J: For what? For what? So that's a 90, over a 90% reduction in the cost to make solar, to collect solar energy. That is huge.

S: It's now the cheapest form of energy.

J: Yeah. Without a doubt. Durability and lifespan. 2004, the expected lifespan of solar panels was around 20 to 25 years. There was definitely performance degrading happening, approximately 1% degradation per year. 2024, anybody have an idea of how long they last now?

G: A thousand episodes.

J: This one was disappointing. So it was 20 to 25 in 2004 and now it's 25 to 30.

S: That's a big difference though. I understand it's disappointing, but that's a different nut to crack slowing down the degradation. But when you're talking about, you talked about the price per watt, but now you got to amortize that over the lifetime of the solar panel, right? So you could look at it a number of different ways. How long until the panel has paid for itself in the electricity that it has produced? And then how long do you basically get free energy at that point? Packing on an extra five years of free energy at the end is huge in terms of the economic benefits the return on investment of it. So that, it seems like a little bit, but actually the economics of that are actually pretty big.

J: So the technology back then, monocrystalline and polycrystalline silicon panels, right? So in essence what happens when the sunlight hits the panels, the material that is in the panel literally turns the sunlight into voltage. It's incredible. And we're very lucky that there's things out there that...

S: That's the photoelectric effect discovered by who, Jay?

J: That guy, yeah, that guy did it.

S: Yeah.

J: It was awesome that he did it too. I really appreciate it.

S: Einstein.

J: It was Einstein.

E: Didn't he win something?

J: Like I said, yeah, it was Einstein.

E: He won an award for that.

J: He figured that out over a lunch. It took him like three hours. He's like, oh yeah, I got it. Yeah, we're going to convert the sun into energy and we're going to kill the world with nukes. That's what we're going to do. All right.

S: So one page paper, one of them is PhD and Nobel prize.

J: Yep.

E: Nothing for relativity though.

B: Right.

J: So we are using the same technology today, but, and it gets a little technical and I'm not going to even like, no reason to really go into the details here. Bottom line is we've just been improving the the monocrystalline and polycrystalline. We're making it way more efficient than it was. And they think that it's interesting. You think about what's the future going to be. And throughout the years of covering solar panels, cause I'm a huge fan of it, is they keep saying, oh, it's going to stop at this. And then it creeps up a little bit. Oh, it's going to stop at this. And then it creeps up a little bit. But I do think that the 30% thing is going to stick around for quite a while.

S: So yes and no. The 29% is the theoretical, like in laws of physics, maximum for Silicon rigid solar panels, but we're not stopping with silicon, right? So we're developing perovskite, which I think the theoretical limit is in the upper forties. And then we're also doing the organic solar panels, which are, are just getting to like the 18% efficiency now, but they're really cheap and they're flexible and they're basically, they may have their Renaissance very, very soon, but they're now they're also doing other things, right? So they're layering the solar panels. The idea is to trap those photons and you don't let them go until they turn into a electron, right? So they're figuring out how to do that. There's no reason why we can't get efficiency in the fifties using some combination of like layered perovskite and silicon with-

J: That could be 50 years away.

S: No, no, no. I think we'll probably be in the, the upper twenties by the end of the decade will be in the thirties. You know, I think it's almost like, interestingly, my track, the year will be in the 30% efficiencies in the thirties, maybe get into the forties in the forties. And then who knows like where it's going to go from there. But I think we're, if we're extrapolating from laboratory findings to companies cranking out solar panels with those properties, there's like a five to 10 year delay there. And so we can extrapolate out that far, but we already have like the proof of concept technology to get into at least the mid thirties or close to 40%.

C: You're putting me into an existential crisis talking about these years, the twenties and the thirties and the forties. Don't do that to me. I don't like, say 2030, say 2040, I don't like it.

J: A few more things I got to get to real quick. So energy production, 2004, 150 to 200 Watts, 2024, 350 to 450 Watts.

S: Is that per panel?

J: I believe so. Yeah. So energy production integration, back in 2004, like the infrastructure wasn't there hooking it up to the grid. What do you do with the electricity? No batteries that can handle it. You know, all that, all the deficiencies that we had back then. And look at what, where we are today. Anybody can get solar panels. There's really expensive, but there's companies out there that will rent them to you essentially and give you lower costs and all that stuff.

S: And they don't so you could, you could lease them, but you could also like for what I did, cause I have solar panels on my house, no money down. They just use my roof. They put up the solar panels and I buy electricity from them at 20% cheaper than what I would otherwise be spending. That's it. So no money down.

J: But it is very easy to integrate solar panels into your house and the grid and all those technologies are nice right now. Nice, that's a stupid word, but they're in place and they work, which is fantastic. Energy storage. Back in 2004, we had very rudimentary and expensive solar installations. They didn't work that well. They just didn't, they weren't there. They were using a lead acid batteries, limited lifespan, limited capacities, just not good. Today we're really doing well. Lithium ion battery storage Tesla's Powerwall, LG's chem batteries. These systems are massively more efficient, have very long lifespans. They allow the solar energy to be stored, you could use the solar energy anytime in those batteries, you could store them for, for longer periods of time when you need them. So this has significantly enhanced the reliability and also the versatility of solar panels because the batteries are the yin yang with, with solar panels. And you know, like we've said this many times on the show, we need grid storage. You know, it's great. All these people are getting solar panels and everything, and they have these little batteries in their houses, but we do need some like really big, significant grid storage, battery centers that are going to really help load balance and all that stuff. That's where the big money is going to come in and it's going to take a of time to do that. The environmental impact. So the environmental impacts of producing solar panels was a big concern back in 2004, particularly with these energy intensive processes that they were using back then to manufacture the silicon and they're using lots of hazardous chemicals and all that stuff. So today we have lots of advances in manufacturing techniques. We've dramatically reduced the energy it takes and the resources that it takes in order to produce the solar panels. And the industry has made a lot of strides in recycling old panels and everything. We're doing all the things that they predicted that we would be doing, but they are actually happening.

S: Yeah. Another way to look at that. So like I talked about the time for the money investment to get paid back. There's also a carbon payback time, right? How long do you have to use a panel before you now have saved as much carbon as it took to make the panel in the first place? And that is getting shorter and shorter. That's only a couple of years now too. So they're very environmentally efficient, which is great.

J: So the market adoption in 2004, this was, solar panels were a complete niche market. Like nobody was doing it it was really weird. People were like seeing solar panels was an odd thing for people. People wouldn't, had no interest in having them integrated into their homes. You know, it was like a real it was a thing that people looked at and it was like, wow, what the hell are they doing today? It's it's mainstream, completely mainstream. We have widespread adoption all over the world, residential, commercial. We have utility scale markets globally. Solar power is a critical component to our energy today. It's completely cooked in to everything. You know, we rely on it now. And that's fantastic. And the last thing I'll just quickly talk about is policy and incentives. In the short version here, it's the same story as all the other ones. Back then, governments were barely trickling funds into it and everything. And today, governments can't get out of their way fast enough to figure out ways to use solar decrease costs and help companies obtain higher efficiencies by funding them to do the research and everything. So we, this is a massive, massive success in the last 20 years.

S: It's one of the technologies that has really changed the most since we've been doing the show.

G: Steve, what was the thing that made you decide to finally go with, was, go with solar panels on your roof? Was it, I mean, you explained that it's a pretty good deal, but was it like a commercial you saw? Was it like you had wanted it all along and then finally the pricing incentive was right? Or what?

S: So it was finding the right company that would, that did it the way I wanted to do it.

G: So you had, you had a concept in your mind of what you wanted to spend or not spend.

S: Yeah. Plus it was also just like, once I decided this is something I want to do, I had to research it and it took a long time. The big piece was the regulations, which is state by state, right? Because if you have bad regulations in your state, you can get screwed because you could end up buying electricity that you don't use, right? And then if you don't get full credit for it, right? So in other words, like the company says you buy, well, you will put the solar panels on your roof. You buy all the electricity that they make, right? If you use it, you use it. If you don't, it goes to the grid and you get credit for it from the electricity company. And the electricity company can say, we're only going to give you half of what, of what it's actually worth. Or they'll say, and they're trying to pass laws like in Florida where they, the electricity company has to only pay you the wholesale cost of the electricity, not the retail cost. So you're buying retail from them and they're buying wholesale from you, but they're not really giving you money. They're just giving you credits for electricity that you're going to be buying from them later. So it's a racket. They're just trying to protect their profits. So but like in Connecticut where I live, we have grade A good regulations where they have to give me a hundred percent credit for the electricity that they get. So that means it's cost effective for me, right? But if you live in a bad state with bad regulation, you can get screwed. So you've got to be, you've got to know that law before you, before you do the investment. All right.

History of Fusion (48:36)

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S: Bob. This is another tech. This is a both a technology and a pseudoscience one wrapped into one. Tell us about the history of fusion.

B: Cold fusion and hot fusion. That's what I've been tasked to cover. It's an interesting journey for both of these technologies. I'll start with cold fusion. I call it the cold fusion hubbub of 89. Who remembers that? Who remembers that? All the old people raise their hands.

S: Can we do the clap instead of the visual thing for the podcast?

G: OK, here we go. Who remembers that? Ready? And clap. (audience claps) Who doesn't? Who doesn't remember that? Here we go. (audience claps)

C: Same amount of people.

E: About half, yeah.

B: So cold fusion started in a lot of ways in the 1920s. A lot of scientists, or at least what we saw Fleischman and Pons do, in the 1920s, scientists discovered that palladium, heavy metal palladium, was able to absorb a lot of hydrogen, an amazing amount of hydrogen. And they were thinking, maybe if you get all this hydrogen in one place, something special could happen that could cause fusion. Fast forward to the 1980s, electrochemist Martin Fleischman rediscovered this discovery. And he brought in his buddy Stanley Pons, another electrochemist, and they said, let's see what we can do with this. Can we create an experiment to take advantage of this palladium that can suck in hydrogen, deuterium, in an amazing way? So they created their palladium experiment. And I really took a deep dive into this experiment. What was this really all about? I never really dug really deep into it. So palladium is special because it's got this unusual crystalline structure that is able to absorb hydrogen into it, 900 times its own volume. It's really an amazing feat, if you think about it. Something about the crystalline structure. And also, the electrons themselves are very, very accommodating. They actually interface with the hydrogen and shepherd them into the crystalline structure. They were thinking that perhaps when all of this hydrogen gets in there, that it could be more reactive, that it could be more organized in such a way that it can create some sort of low-temperature fusion going on here. This is called catalytic fusion. And this is a world-changing idea. Think about it. Labs across the world potentially being able to create fusion for very little money, because this is a very inexpensive laboratory setup. This would be an amazing scenario, low-temperature, low-pressure fusion. That's just like... That's a holy grail that got everybody excited. Just for a comparison, for fusion to happen in the sun, we're talking 27 million degrees. It doesn't even matter if it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, right? We're up into 27 million. That's a lot. So this is a huge difference. Their public debut, March 1989, I remember that day. They had a press conference. They had a scientific paper. They claimed sustained nuclear fusion reaction. Their two major claims, though, was excess heat that apparently chemistry could not explain. And they also claimed that there were nuclear byproducts, like neutrons, that are hallmarks of a fusion reaction.

S: My memory is we thought that was bullshit from the get-go.

B: Yeah, we really did. And the biggest complaint is that how are you going to get, using low-temperature and low-pressure, how are you going to get atoms close enough to fuse? Now, imagine you've got two atoms that you want to fuse together. The electron clouds, they don't want to cooperate. You're going to need high pressure and high temperature. But even if you can get past the electron cloud, the protons, like charges, they don't play well together. So what were they saying at that time? But I'll finish with the scientists were like, this is ridiculous. That's why they had such a knee-jerk reaction. So they were saying, Feynman said in his press release, what we have done is to open the door of a new research area. Our indications are that the discovery will be relatively easy to make it into a usable technology, generating heat and power. University of Utah had an interesting quote. They were like all in. They were totally all in with this. And I'm sure they really regret it. They said, it's a breakthrough process that has the potential to provide inexhaustible sources of energy. OK. So, but what were the scientists saying? Some of the scientists at the time were saying, Dr. Nathan Lewis in Caltech, he's like, it's a simple chemical reaction that has nothing to do with fusion. Radiochemist Dr. Edmund Storms said, many people see only what they want to see. Very interesting skeptical point right there. At some point in the history of any new idea, the problem no longer involves logic, but is psychological. My favorite quote from Ronald Parker, nuclear scientist at MIT. He said, this is scientific schlock, maybe fraud. So that's what he was saying at the time. So like I said, they were skeptical because this goes against what we know about nuclear physics. And by the way, these guys were electrochemists. They were not nuclear physicists at all. They weren't even looking for neutrons until a nuclear physicist said, guys, you guys kind of need to look for neutrons, right? Only then did they even think of doing it. They really should have. They really should have partnered with somebody who was more of an expert in that specific field. This was interesting. Don't cut this out of the show later on, Steve. This is fascinating. If somebody says cold fusion is impossible, theoretically there is an interesting way that they could make it happen. They probably won't, but this would work. You've heard of muons. The muons are essentially very heavy electrons. If we were able, and we could do this if we wanted to, we could take hydrogen atoms and replace the electrons with muons. And that means you've got a very lightweight electron over here, but if you had a muon, it would be down here next to the nucleus. So you would basically be shrinking the hydrogen atoms. And because they would be so much closer, you could have spontaneous cold fusion happening if we could set that up properly. The problem is, of course, is that muons are incredibly expensive to create. It would cost more money to create the muons than you would get out of the cold fusion.

S: More energy.

B: More energy, right.

S: What did I say? You said money.

B: Money, okay. So fascinating to me.

S: Yeah, so basically it would be a net negative in terms of the energy of that process. Cold fusion would be happening, but it's not going to be producing a net energy.

B: And it would only last for two microseconds. That's another complication. Another complication. Not a deal killer, but we cannot create enough of them to make that practical. So maybe something for the future. I don't know.

G: Bob just said two microseconds is not a deal killer, just by the way. Something lasting two microseconds.

B: Not for physicists, baby.

E: Let's just say picoseconds.

B: In these scenarios, it's helpful to say, what would we expect to happen if cold fusion were real? What would we expect to happen? And in one word, it's a replication. And there was a very interesting episode three years before this, or four years. Do you remember high temperature superconductivity, Steve? That was another huge story. They came up with a new class of high temperature superconductors. I mean, not high, high, but it was within liquid nitrogen, which was a huge, huge increase. So what happened after that major discovery? Hundreds of labs throughout the world were able to replicate. They were able to, they took the recipe, they made the high temperature superconductor, they made it happen. IBM replicated it, University of Tokyo replicated it, Max Planck Institute in Germany replicated it, and the University of Chicago replicated it back in 1986. Good job. So how did replication go for cold fusion? In one word, it was a shit show. It was horrible. Most labs could not do it at all.

S: Is that one word? Shit show, one word? Hyphenated?

B: Yes, it's one word. So most labs could not, they were looking at the recipe, which wasn't a good recipe, by the way, and they couldn't replicate it. Some labs claimed that they were able to replicate it, but they didn't even agree with each other on what you needed to replicate it. And then some of them retracted their replication. It was really, really horrible. And then when you looked a layer deeper, they looked at the neutron equipment that they were using, and it was faulty. So you couldn't even trust their neutron data that they were getting, which still was kind of pathetic. The number of neutrons they were getting were not what you would expect. The famous excess heat measurement turns out that that probably wasn't even a thing, because they just estimated, they looked at their experiment and they estimated what the heat was, and they weren't even necessarily right about that. So they seemed to be wrong about so much. But for me, the coup de grace, is that how you pronounce it, Steve? Coup de grace. Because everyone, all the scientists back then were saying, we need to replicate this, your instructions really suck, you need to give us good instructions, and they refused to do it. Why? Because they wanted to patent this process, so they didn't want to communicate too much information to the other scientists. And that, of course, is horrible. That's not how you do science. So they allowed somebody to come in to do five weeks of testing on Fleischmann and Pond's own equipment. He let, I don't know why they let him in, they let him in, he worked at it for five weeks, could not replicate their results with their own equipment. To me, that was just like the the death blow right there.And so soon after that, 19, let's see, 1990, the next year, American Physical Society said that the claims are unsubstantiated, and that was a huge killer for it. 1994, the US Department of Energy had similar results. They said that there is no evidence supporting their claims of excess heat production. 2004, National Academy of Sciences looked at it again, again, and again, and again. There's nothing here. There was really nothing here. And then, okay, this was interesting, 2007, an Italian researcher, Andrea Rossi, claims to have developed a working cold fusion device. The energy catalyzer, the ECAT, have you heard about that since 2007? No, nobody's heard of that, right, because it was baloney. And that's how it's been since then. Up until this day, you've got, it's still being researched, and you won't see cold fusion though, because those words will not get you anywhere. So they call it LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. That's a euphemism that they use for it, because cold fusion is death. Google, Google spent a lot of money trying to replicate it in 2019. Why is Google looking at this in 2019? They failed. They failed to find it. And there's still millions of dollars being spent on this, trying to find this holy grail.

S: I think it's the allure of the payoff.

B: Absolutely, absolutely.

S: And just as a quick aside, because I read an article, I forget if I listened to it or read it, but it was about the psychology of venture capitalists, which is to invest in a lot of crap, hoping that one thing hits. And the thing is, the payoff could be so high that it, orders of magnitude more than covers all the losses. So you could see a lot of VC investing in this as just one of many lottery tickets. You know what I mean? Like, if it hits, I want to be part of it, right? I don't want to miss out on cold fusion.

C: But there's a big difference between investing in a bunch of lottery tickets, knowing that someone eventually is going to get the Powerball, and investing a lot of lottery tickets when you know that it's not possible for the lottery to be successful.

E: It's like you're chasing a unicorn.

S: Because it's pseudoscience. You're right. It's not a low probability. It's pseudoscience. There's no probability.

C: Yeah, and these are companies that have many scientists working.

S: They should know better. Yeah.

C: It's pretty strange.

S: Google should know better.

B: If I bought a lotto ticket and it said the laws of physics are against you winning lotto, I would not be buying any lotto tickets. It's amazing to me that people will throw millions at this. You know, unless it's muon-catalyzed fusion, don't go anywhere near cold fusion. All right. Hot fusion. Hot fusion. We've lived through a lot of hot fusion. It's been a very frustrating journey. But there actually has been a lot of success, especially lately. And of course, the goal of hot fusion is very tantalizing, right? You understand the allure of this, because even though it's so complicated, there's a near unlimited fuel supply. The radioactivity is trivial compared to fission. The energy density using fusion is a million times chemical energy. And it's carbon-free. Hello, carbon-free. So, the idea, very basically, the idea with hot fusion is that you've got lighter elements that fuse together to create a heavier element with a little bit of extra mass energy left over, and that left over is what we want. We want that left over energy. Kinetic energy is turned to heat. The heat is turned to steam. The steam turns to turbines. Then you get electricity from that. That's what we want to do with it. That's the goal. The idea that hot fusion was happening in the sun and what was happening was 1930s Hans Bethe. B-E-T-H-E. How do you pronounce B-E-T-H-E? Bethe? I don't know how to pronounce his last name. Beta. That's how you spell his name. Awesome. All right.

G: No, Bob, she's just calling you a beta.

B: He's the first one to theorize in detail that nucleosynthesis was happening in the sun. That's where the sun is powering itself. This is gravitational confinement fusion. You get a lot of mass. You get a lot of gravity. That's gravitational confinement. 1952, the first hydrogen bomb. That's man-made, but it's uncontrolled fusion. That's out of scope for this discussion. 1951. This was surprising to me and Steve. 1951 was the first controlled fusion reaction using a device called the Z-pinch, using a magnetic field. Magnetic confinement fusion, that's the second way to fuse elements. Magnetic confinement using a magnetic field. It lasted only a couple of microseconds. It was unstable. A better idea surfaced, like the Tokamak, which I'm sure a lot of people have heard about. That's in 1954. The Tokamak design was born using a toroidal or a donut-shaped magnetic field to confine plasma, not allowing the plasma to escape, and where the fusion is happening inside there. The next major milestone was in the 70s. There's lots of milestones, but this one was big for this discussion. In the 70s, early 70s, inertial confinement fusion design was first proposed. Inertial confinement basically throws a lot of energy onto a fuel pellet that causes massive energy deposition right there that causes shockwaves. The inertia of the shockwaves going in, that's what's confining it. That's why it's called inertial confinement, and you can get fusion inside there. Let me go through some of these quotes, though. Some people were saying about fusion, this type of hot fusion. Albert Einstein in 1930 said, the fusion of nuclei is an interesting theoretical problem, but it's not likely to become a practical energy source in our lifetimes. You can't really disagree with that, but let's go to Stephen Hawking in the 1990s. You can't really disagree with that at that time, but the biggest joke that I'm sure everybody has heard about is this quote that who knows where it first came from. Fusion is 30 years away, or 50 years away, and always will be. That's the quote. That's the quote everybody's heard. I've been hearing that for decades, and it always kind of pissed me off, but where did that quote come from? It came because if you go through the history, there's been so many stops and starts, so many dead ends, so many failed promises, and pissing people off that the increase in technological sophistication, the end results, weren't happening. That's why people just get frustrated. Oh, it's always going to be 50 years away. And then the National Ignition Facility had their breakthrough in 2022. This was really amazing. So they used an inertial confinement system. They have 192 very powerful lasers hitting a little nugget of fuel, and they actually experienced ignition for the first time. This was a self-sustaining fusion reaction. And that basically means that they had 2 megajoules go in to this nugget, and 3 megajoules come out. Where did that come from? That was fusion happening. Now don't get me started about the fact that what about all the power that they generated outside of that nugget? That was 300 megajoules, so it's not efficient. We know it's not efficient. It's incredibly inefficient, but it happened. We were able to get more energy out than what went into that specific area. Jill Hruby, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said on that day, Monday, December 5, 2022, was an important day in science. Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation. Okay. So what's going on with the current Tokamaks? I think they have a brighter future than inertial confinement, because these are meant to be commercially viable. The inertial confinement is not really designed to be commercially viable. This is an experiment in nuclear physics. They don't want to create a reactor that can then power the world. Scaling that up would not be impossible, but it would be extremely difficult compared to a Tokamak design. You've heard of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Project. That's the largest one in existence. 35 countries have been working on it. It looks very promising, but not as promising as it used to. Now they're saying that there's been massive delays. They might not really make any progress until 2039. So I'm afraid that this big one is going to become irrelevant at some point. It's really frustrating. I have a lot more hope in MIT's SPARC reactor. They've got a Tokamak. That's using the latest tech. That's using the most advanced technology, where the other one, ITER, is basically based on technology that's a lot older than what MIT is doing. So MIT's Tokamak can be much, much smaller. It's designed to be commercial. It's simpler. It's cheaper. Their superconducting magnets are amazingly powerful. When they tested their new superconducting magnet, they said that the cost per watt of a fusion reactor dropped by a factor of 40 in one day. If we're going to see a commercial fusion reactor, I think it could be this one. This one seems very, very promising. All right. So the bottom line after all of this is that more researchers are more confident that we are going to have a fusion reactor at some point in the near future. We know, at the very least, we know that controlled fusion works. We experienced ignition. You could, I've seen plans for this inertial confinement design, plans to make it actually a viable reactor in a lot of ways.

S: So what do you think Bob, like 30 years?

B: I think that we've reached a point where maybe we might be at 30 years now, but you could say next year, 29 years, and the year after that, 28 years, potentially. But no, I think the writing's on the wall. When you experience ignition, I mean, that's such a major breakthrough that I think we will see a working Tokamak reactor, but the big but there is that it may never be commercially viable with solar and wind and all these other ways of producing power. I think a nuclear reactor could probably never be commercially viable. It would be just too expensive and we'll never see it proliferate on the earth. I think we will definitely see them in space, in rockets, because they don't care. You don't care if it's super efficient in your rocket. All you know is that a fusion rocket, it's going to get you to Mars in like four weeks or whatever it is. So I think we're going to see fusion reactors in space, maybe not on earth. If they can make it commercially viable, that would be fantastic, but it's looking now that it's just far too complex, but we'll see what MI can do with their simpler design. So that's my take on fusion.

S: It sounds like you've come around more to my point of view, because Bob and I have been arguing about this for decades, about how long it's going to take to get to a commercial fusion reactor. I think if we do get there, it's going to be the end of this century or longer. Even that, as Bob says, it may be, it'll be much, much longer than that. There may be a point where it's technically possible, but nobody's going to do it because it just would cost way too much money.

B: I think we'll see in the lifetime of many people here, we'll see a full scale working reactor. But like I said, it's not necessarily going to ever be commercially viable.

S: Producing net energy, like really net energy, not the only if you count the core energy. Because like you said, when we got to ignition, we're still 300 factors away from producing net energy. That's massive efficiency we need to...

B: It is. And that's why, even though you could scale up and make the inertial confinement more efficient, I think the Tokamak, Steve, that's the one that's designed to be commercially viable. I think we could, but it still might be too complex and too expensive.

G: Can I tell a quick cold fusion story?

B: Yes.

G: So years ago, I played this thing, it was a comedy festival. It was called the Cold Fusion Comedy Festival, and it had nothing to do with cold fusion. They called it that for whatever reason. They called it that. And they asked if I wanted to do a couple of my songs to be a musical interlude between the standup comedians. I was like, sure. And I thought, okay, I'm doing the Cold Fusion Comedy Festival, I have to do a cold fusion joke. I have to do one cold fusion joke that no one will get. And I said, I'm going to do a cold fusion joke, because this is the Cold Fusion Comedy Festival, and none of you are going to get this joke, and it's going to be so great, because none of you... I'm going to shit the bed, this is going to be great. So I said, so these two realtors are talking to each other, and the one realtor says to the other realtor, he says, I sold that house on the lake. And the first realtor is like, you sold the house on the lake? He's like, yeah, I sold the house on the lake. He said, but that house on the lake, the dock was all messed up. Who bought that house? And he said, these two guys, Pons and Fleischmann, they bought this house with the messed up dock. Why would they buy the house on the lake with the messed up dock? And he said, well, everybody knows that Pons and Fleischmann don't believe in peer review. (applause) It's a good joke, right? So here's what happens. So I'm going to say the punchline, and then just from the back, you, sir, right there with that sort of green t-shirt, yeah, you just look down. When I finish saying the joke, just you by yourself, just go, yeah, all right? But no one else make a noise. No one else make any noise, okay? No one else say anything. So I'm going to say, this is what happened at the festival, all right? So like, wait like a second, and this is exactly, it's the guy in the green shirt right there. So yeah, well, everybody knows Pons and Fleischmann don't believe in peer review.

Audience member: Yeah.

G: That's exactly what happened. (applause) It was awesome.

J: Oh my God. But you and that guy.

G: Oh yeah.

J: You were tight.

G: Star Wars shirt. It was fantastic.

Medical Scams (1:12:28)

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S: Cara, are you going to tell us about the last 20 years of medical scams.

C: Yeah. So, so it's interesting when we were first talking about the stories that we were going to tell here, we're like, how do we even approach a question like, what has happened over the last 20 years when it comes to medical scams? And the first thing that came to mind was a very recent episode that we did where we were talking about Miracle Mineral Solution. And I was like, oh, we talk about that a lot on the show, MMS, which of course is this, it's bleach. I mean, let's be honest. It's bleach, like industrial bleach that has been marketed as a cure for anything from HIV to cancer to autism. And it's really dangerous. And I think that's the reason we see it come up time and time again is because they're documented deaths from this. It's a very, very dangerous form of alternative medicine. And I, what I originally was going to do was go through the archive. And I did this for MMS the first mention, episode 285, that was on December 29th, 2010, very first mention. And then again in 2014, 2016, 2019, the FDA warned against it, 2021, this peddler in Florida who like ran a church, he was first indicted, 2023 convicted, 2024, another person in New Zealand went to prison. So like kind of spanning this entire history, we saw actual change when it comes to MMS. So I was like, okay, I'm going to do this for like all the medical pseudoscience. And then I was like, no, I have a full-time job, I'm not doing that. So I gave up on that. And then I asked ChatGPT for help for some other things. So I wanted to go back and say, okay, what are some of the earliest forms of medical pseudoscience? And way back, like looking back to Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE, we're looking at things like humoral theory and humoral theory, of course, then kind of bloodletting followed from that. And bloodletting persisted all the way up until the 19th century, like long after we knew that this was not a valid form of medical intervention. So oftentimes this is kind of like touted as one of the original medical scams, like the earliest pseudoscience, but snake oil, patent medicines and even though we don't often, we use the term snake oil all the time on the show, we don't often hear about patent medicine, but we do. It's just been repackaged and we see that theme time and time again.

G: Was snake oil like literally snake oil?

C: I think they were selling it as if, it was snake oil, but they were selling it as if snake oil had medicinal properties.

S: Yeah. So the snake oil was a snake oil.

G: Made from snakes or something they excreted or like it was what?

S: It was some kind of snake extract.

G: Extract.

E: Oh, not venom though.

S: But obviously that was just one of hundreds of treatments, but somehow that became the iconic snake oil.

C: Snake like on the side of the truck. Oil of snake. Phrenology, of course, radium cure. And so you start to see these changes that are kind of moving with the zeitgeist, that are moving with new technologies. Different alternative cancer treatments have been popular throughout different eras like Gerson therapy these like magic diets that are supposed to cure cancer. And of course there are the big ones that we come back to time and time again. I wanted to figure out how many references to homeopathy, how many references to chiropractic have been on the show, but I think it like broke all the search engines, so I can't, I can't tell you that number. It was a lot. It was too many. It was a lot. Lots of detoxes, diet cleanses. I've been really fascinated by the types of things that are touted at medi spas. The types of different new treatments that are evolving with the actual evolution of medicine where sort of key words or interesting new developments are then stolen by charlatans and pushed in ways that are not evidence-based. A really big one that I think it's hard looking back because I've been on the show for about half of the time that it's been on air, so the whole first half of the show I wasn't present for, but one of these very persistent forms of medical pseudoscience, the anti-vax movement, which we all can kind of like go back, maybe not to the earliest of the era. I think as soon as there was a vaccine, there was anti-vax, right? So we know that there was like a big change, right? With Wakefield and with all of the long debunked claims that Wakefield made about autism. But of course, then COVID came and we saw this massive resurgence yet again, not just with anti-vaccine, but with all of the alternative treatments that were touted like ivermectin, and like you could just shine a light inside your body. I think that'll work. Chiropractic, like I mentioned, and subluxation theory, essential oils, we don't even really talk about that on the show that much, but this is like one of the bigger ones, alkaline diets and water, colon cleansing, a lot of the different categories. It's funny because this is such a beautiful example of one of the things we often talk about on the show, which is constructs and taxonomy and categorizing things and putting things into boxes. It's like, how do I even organize medical myths? Because there's like the homunculus type myths and then there's the cleansing type myths and some of them cross into different categories and it's a fascinating study when you look at all of the different pseudoscientific treatments that are touted. Even things like psychic surgery or ear candling or cryotherapy, that one's gotten popular again lately. Cupping, we talk about cupping every time the Olympics come up. Vaginal steaming, vaginal aches.

J: What?

C: What?

J: I've never heard of that.

E: You don't remember that?

C: Yes, you have. We've covered it like 10 times on the show.

J: What are they steaming? Why?

C: Is that a serious question?

J: What are they saying it does?

C: The vagina is what they're steaming.

J: But what is it supposed to do?

C: Oh, so I think vaginal steaming is a really beautiful example of the way that the wellness industry really preys on women and how men are completely unaware of it. (applause) It really is pernicious because you're right, Jay, I think that was such a beautiful example because the way that men are preyed on, and that's not to say that there aren't pressures to maintain certain body images.

S: Well, we have our dick pills.

C: You have your dick pills and that will never go away, I don't think. The thing is, those are FDA approved and often covered by Medicare.

G: And the purpose of that is about vigor and virility.

C: Whereas on women, it's shame, shame, shame. You're dirty, you smell, you're dangerous, you're sick, you're unbalanced, your pores are too clogged. You're not delivering the promise of a clean, virginal, beautiful child. And so it's horrible. And when you actually do start to look into the pseudoscience in medispas, you see those trends over and over and over. There's some that, like when I was looking into this, I hadn't heard of, like laser lipo. Have we ever talked about that on the show? Just like, you're skinny now or like psychic surgery, reiki. These are all the same concept, right? Like are you calm? Do you feel cured of your mental illness? Magnetic therapy, things like that. But we also talk about things what is the harm, right? We often talk about the harm, the harm of medical treatments, of pseudoscientific medical treatments. And there's so many different ways to even categorize that. Like I was struggling when I was working on prompts, even for a ChatGPT, like the most pernicious, the most dangerous, the most whatever. It's like, but how do you even define that, right? Is it the number of deaths that are directly attributable to this pseudoscience? Is it the number of deaths that happen because in taking the pseudoscience, we delayed taking a legitimate treatment. Is it the number of externalized problems? The amount of money that desperate people were spending on these things, or as we often talk about, the kind of perpetuating of legitimacy of certain industries, even those that we think of as maybe not necessarily being harmful, but being more on the neutral side. They still perpetuate. And I think a perfect example, once again, is the beauty industry and the amount of blame and shame that women carry because of this multi-billion dollar industry. But I was thinking, okay, what are some of the ones that are documented, killed people? And I compiled a little list, chelation therapy for autism. We know that this causes kidney damage, cardiac arrest, and death, and there have been documented deaths. Gerson therapy, which is this alternative cancer treatment. It's like intense diets and coffee enemas and stuff like that. And people just die, they have cancer, they treat it with a coffee enema, you're not going to do well. Colonic hydrotherapy, colon cleansing has led to perforated intestines, death due to those kinds of complications like sepsis. Drinking raw milk, not a good idea, we've talked about that quite a bit. Black salve, it's a corrosive paste that's claimed to draw out cancer from the skin, and it causes tissue necrosis. It's a necrotic paste that causes severe skin damage, disfigurement, infections, and people have died because, of course, they're not treating their cancer.

S: You say disfigurement, but I don't want to gloss over that. You have to look at pictures, if you look at black salve, look at pictures on the internet, and people's entire, like half their face is in a way, like really horrible disfigurement.

C: And so that's another prompt, like what are the grossest pseudoscientific, yeah. So vitamin megadosing, we've seen example after example when we do what's the harm. Homeopathy, of course, in place of conventional medicine, ozone therapy, and I mean, we could sit here and just talk this whole time just about homeopathy, and I feel like it's great that this is, you're the SGU audience, so I don't have to go into what homeopathy actually is, but I feel like it's groundhog day with people in my life, because they're like, oh, it's just natural, it's just, no, but it's an alternate, it's like, do you really, read the Wikipedia page, come back to me, and then we'll talk about whether you are embarrassed to have those pills in your medicine cabinet.

J: You know, isn't it strange that there isn't a homeopathy emergency room?

C: Yeah, exactly. Didn't somebody like...

S: The homeopathic ER, yeah.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Mitchell and Webb effect, I think, did it, yeah, yeah. It's good, it's good.

J: I didn't just make that up?

C: No.

E: No.

C: No idea.

J: Okay.

C: Ozone therapy, vampire facials, we recently talked about, and there's a massive outbreak of HIV at this medispa in New Mexico, where they were doing these platelet-rich plasma vampire facials. So what I did decide to do is say, okay, 2005, when the podcast started, 2024, where we are now, what were the top trends each year? What had the public's attention? And I went both with the wellness fads. The wellness fads are interesting, because some of them are actually legitimate, or I don't want to say legitimate. Some of them aren't overtly pseudoscience, but some of them are like, what even? And then I also looked at just the most pseudoscientific trends during those years. So I'm going to run through them really quickly, because it's fascinating. So 2005, juice cleanses, colon cleanses. 2006, Pilates was hot. Apparently, there's a hot search term, which is great, whatever, Pilates is cool. Magnetic therapy. 2007, superfoods acai bowls. Ear candling. Really? In 2007, people were like, we're all about the ear candling. 2008, we got yoga, and then we've got homeopathy. 2009, CrossFit and ionized water was all the rage in 2009.

G: These are from what? These are-

C: These are top trending-

G: Searches?

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Across the internet. The first one is whatever the wellness fad was, and then the second one was like the top trending pseudoscience, yeah, yeah. Or medical scam.

S: Health pseudoscience is one of the number one pieces of information on the internet.

C: It's huge. It's massive. And it's across all social media platforms, it's across, yeah, it's a billion, multi-billion dollar industry. 2009, we got CrossFit was great in the wellness industry, and then ionized water. 2010, veganism was a big wellness trending topic, and anti-vaccine movements. This is interesting, so come back around. 2011, gluten-free diets and the human chorionic gonadotropin drops and injections that were marketed for weight loss. I didn't even- Okay. In 2012, meditation and raspberry ketones were all the rave. Miracle fat burner, apparently. 2013, green smoothies and miracle mineral supplements. This is like the top trending-

E: Bleach.

C: Yeah, bleach. Bleach. 2014, paleo diet and green coffee bean extract. A lot of weight loss miracles on here. Again, that blame and the shame. Yeah. 2015, miracle fitness trackers. That was a big wellness industry thing. And 2015, for pseudoscience, waist trainers. What year is it? You were talking about the 40s before. Which one? Okay. 2016, bulletproof coffee and alkaline diets. 2017, cryotherapy and essential oil cures. 2018, CBD oil and stem cell therapy scams. These were, there were a lot of news articles about those. 2019, intermittent fasting and the blood type diet. People still buy into that. It's astrology. 2020, home workouts and what do you think? COVID-19 miracle cures, of course.

J: Did you say home workouts?

C: Home workouts. Yeah. That was like the biggest wellness trend of the- Lockdown. It was lockdown.

J: Yeah, but what's wrong with home workouts?

C: Nothing. I was like, this is the biggest wellness trend.

J: Oh, I'm sorry.

C: Yeah. So yeah. So with the wellness trends, it's interesting how many of them are pseudoscience. There've been like three so far that were okay, I think. Yeah. Wearable fitness trackers, home workouts, some yoga, some Pilates, a bit of meditation maybe.

S: Exercise and snake oil.

C: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 2021, immune boosting supplements and anti-5G radiation devices. Yep. 2020-

G: You see the signals coming in from the government. We got to make sure that-

C: And the chip and the vaccine. It's all getting mixed up now. 2022, biggest wellness trend, mental health apps. Makes sense, right? Post-COVID or still COVID. 2022, NAD supplements. I didn't even, okay. 2023, hormone balancing diets and ozone therapy, also deadly. And that brings us to 2024, which is not yet over, but so far, tech-driven wellness, like AI personalized wellness plans and frequency healing devices.

E: Yeah.

C: What? We think about what are the trends we can see the trends coming and going with the zeitgeist. We can see the trends coming and going with you know, the pressures that we're under but this is cyclical. Nothing is new. It's all repacked with a brand new name.

S: And over hundreds of years, you think this is all a modern phenomenon? You know, one of my favorite examples is a book written 200 years ago about magnet scams like magnetic devices that are all scam.

G: Saying that they're scams 200 years ago saying this is saying BS.

S: Yeah, but this was like all of the herbal supplements that that we are popular today most of them were innovated in the 1900s or earlier and they were sold as natural. The Native Americans do this so it must be natural and healthy. The same bullshit marketing that we have now.

C: And very often the interesting thing is which actually grinds my gears more than almost anything. Is that sort of cultural appropriation where there's a claim that something is wisdom coming from millennia of a people who practice this as part of their cultural rituals, but very often it's just new and repacked. It's a white people will buy this.

S: This is the ancient chineese secret.

C: It's infuriating because it ends up not only harming the person that is being market or the group of people that is being marketed to. It also is harmful for the people who they're claiming are the original people who used it.

G: The fact that every year is like a different trend to shows that it's just fashion. It's cyclical because if there was a hint of truth, you would have a consistent, it would remain at the top search.

C: Chemotherapy, antibotics.

G: And that's gonna constantly be in that because it's an actual boner thing that does what it's supposed to do. Like the only one, so I'm told.

UFOs (1:31:03)

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S: All right, Evan tell us about space aliens and UFOs.

E: It's the reason we're all here, isn't it? UFOs you might you don't mind was I talk about this. I'm gonna use the term UFO. Okay. I know it's UAPs. Okay, but I'm just gonna keep it simple for this sake. Okay, cut me that slack.

S: Low energy reactions, come on. Freking cold fusion.

E: 20-year observation UFOs by the skeptics guide. Yeah, so 2005 right? That's when it all started for us, right? Not not exactly. You know, we've been skeptical activists since 1996 of course and think about 1996. Carl Sagan was still alive and the year prior he'd come out with the Demon-Haunted World. That's when it was first published. How much of did that book have an impact on on everything we did back then is a skeptical organization is still having an impact today. Oh my gosh, so inspirational I can't even go into it. And among the many topics in that book and he covers a lot of things, but he tells stories about UFOs and extra terrestrials and he does this not just because it kind of overlaps with his area of expertise being a planetary scientist, planetary astronomer. He did so because the entire story of the modern UFO phenomenon it makes for excellent examples about how people can differentiate science from pseudoscience and how people can think more critically and really become good skeptics. And as us a new, up-and-coming sort of a group of enthusiasts as we were just getting into this. Oh my gosh. It was the perfect guide for us at the time. I found that over the years because we've covered this a lot you take on a topic like UFOs. And what what is really going on here? Yeah, you can break down the facts and the details of what's being told, what's being reported. What did somebody actually see? What was the photographic evidence? But what it really I think boils down to is becomes a measure of how the media in a very broad way treats the topic of UFOs and that's kind of what we're all subjected to. Everybody. It's been established for a very long time before 2005 that the body of evidence, scientific evidence hard evidence that our planet is being visited by extraterrestrials is zero. Absolutely zero. There is nothing tangible. There is no technology that we've discovered. There's no DNA. There is no physical evidence whatsoever. And what you do have instead in this entire phenomenon is an abundance of anecdotes, of stories, of retelling secondhand, third-hand accounts. Arguments from authority of all kinds accompanied by some other things. Blurry photographs, garbled audio recordings and outright fakes. Outright fake movies both on video and film. That is the body of evidence that they present to you. And for the prior 60 years now, this is dating back now to the 1940s. That's the state of the evidence and the scientific evidence does not amount to anything. Not even a single atom. So and this is all despite the efforts of great people like Carl Sagan or Philip class if you're familiar with the books that he wrote. And he was really a great UFO debunker. There were organizations, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Not to mention Project Blue Book, the Condon Report. But once the idea of UFOs captured sort of the imaginations of our society in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. And the media ran with it. That's it. The damage really had been done at that point. Our culture absolutely fell in love it embraced UFOs and we fell for it hook line and sinker. Jay.

J: Yeah, what's up?

S: Who benefits?

E: Who benefits. Thank you, Jay. Qui bono baby, yeah, I was gonna say George who's gonna make a you to reference or something I'm sure. Who benefits from this, from this phenomenon. I think it boils down to in a sense the media. And I don't just mean the news media that that we have. It's a lot of different things. It's authors of books. It's producers of movies and television shows. It's the art bells of the radio world as well certainly which is something I listen to in my youth as well. They seized this opportunity and they tapped into the wells of human gullibility and are absolutely making bank on it. 60 years. That's the state of things. And we came along 2005 with our podcast. So we tried to counterpunch all of this. Yes, we're the minority voice in all of this but we really wanted to help people understand what UFOs were all about. We wasted no time getting into it episode 1. Episode 1 UFOs here was, reverse engineering of extraterrestrial UFO flight patterns fast completely erratic and unpredictable with gaps in motion. So they were analyzing the apparent patterns of UFO flights using information to speculate about the physics behind it. How could it really possibly be happening? So really right from the get-go what you have here is that the media does not even ask the question is this real at all. Not even. It's a supposition. They absolutely take it at face value. And then they can expand in a billion different directions with a billion different storylines based on that making the assumption, the major stated premise, not even unstated, that UFOs are real. End of story now, we're gonna go explore that in all these different directions. So I thought a reasonable take on where we are 20 years from now and how to sort of deal with this was to measure how well the media has adapted to the reporting of UFO stories over the past 20 years. Has it gotten worse? Is anything about it better whatsoever? And knowing what we knew into in 2005 and having the 10 years of skeptical activism that we did have prior to that we already had recognized what this pattern was. But we wanted to see what the shifts basically were and were there going to be any changes? We knew what the trend was, but will it change, will technology in a sense, podcasting coming up the- Moving from an analog world into a fully digital world. How would this have an impact? I went back and I started to look at all of our episodes in which we talked about UFOs and touched on aliens and so many things and it was massive. I mean Cara kind of you ran into the same issue when- you can't, I mean I'd take five hours up here basically the entire show just talking about just that. Instead what I did is I went back and I used the media's own devices to help me with my observations along with a little help from AI and I was able to hone in on the top UFO related news items for 2005 and then for 2006 and 2007 and so right up to 2024. I was able to come up with five categories, five general categories in which all of these top UFO related stories fell into. Here are the brackets. Public sightings. Okay. Those are witness accounts and the stories and they send the reporter out to talk to the person about what they saw. Government related UFO stories. What are governments around the world doing about it? What kind of panels are they convening? What former people in the government or the military had to say about it? The third category is pop culture and this is where reporting had was centered around the latest television show or the latest movie that came out or some other pop culture reference or other industries of popular culture that have touched on this. Fourth category is UFO proponents, you know the MUFON Organization among some other celebrities who have also gone along and become pro UFO enthusiasts and are kind of backing those efforts. And finally the fifth category science and skepticism. How many of these news articles took a primarily scientific or skeptical approach to them? And I'm gonna break it down for you as percentages, okay out of a lot of a hundred percent. Public sightings was the most common, 40% of the stories over that time over that 20 year period had to do with the public sightings. Right on its tail is government related at 36 percent. So right there that's that's three-quarters of them. The rest of it breaks down like this: pop culture was 8%, UFO proponents 12% and that leaves science and skeptics 4%. 4%. That is about it. Now. How does that have an impact on things and the way that we perceive things? Well, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be too good. I found a couple of different polls that express this. One was a Gallup poll in which they took say in 2019 in which they say they asked people do you think they're alien spacecraft or are they explained by normal human nNatural phenomenon that can be explained. So the change between 2019 and 2021 was a differential of 10 point swing to the direction that these are aliens and alien spacecraft. So absolutely going in the wrong direction and I'm sure there are a lot of reasons that we could delve into as to why that is the case. And here's another poll that I came up with that I found Newsweek and YouGov in 2022 took a poll. Americans who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life. In 1998 they asked this question and it was only 20% who believed absolutely 51% who were like no. No, it's it's human and it's natural. 29% didn't know but in 2022 34% believe, that's a 14 point jump. And 32% said no, it's only natural and that's a 13% drop and the rest also just didn't know. So what I was able to sort of determine is is that the media is having an enormous, absolutely continues to have an enormous impact on the UFO culture and an entire phenomenon and unfortunately in the direction where more people are moving away from the rational scientific explanations of these things. That's what I came up with.

S: I think a lot of it in terms of the recent trends is the whole Pentagon UFO thing.

E: Yes.

S: Right? So and this is what happens is like people get tired of it, it kind of fades into the background kind of the baseline levels and then something new flap happens. A sighting or whatever and then the same cycle repeats itself. They put up a bunch of crappy evidence. The proponents resurrect all the same old stories and sort of incorporate anything new into the same old narrative. Skeptics thoroughly debunk it and then it sort of fades into the background again, but every time it's a huge nothing burger as we like to say. Nothing actually changes. They didn't come up with any actual evidence and the UFO thing is the same thing. When it happened a few years ago, there was a lot of people saying all did we really got it this time, right? There's a whole we really found the aliens this time. This changes everything. And the news media, the mainstream media, New York Times, Weipo are saying like this is something we need to take seriously now. Like finally we could take it seriously. They were so excited that they could talk about UFOs and get all the clickbait without being embarrassed about doing crappy journalism even though they basically had plausible deniability. And we said this is nothing. This is gonna turn into nothing. And what happened? The Pentagon did their analysis, came out with a report and they said it's nothing. They said there's no evidence of aliens. That's the bottom line.

G: As soon as any of these types of things start changing their names. As soon as it changes it realizes that UFOs are silly. You cross over into what what your image is here big gray, no, it's kind of so we have to change the brand. And whenever there's a brand change you just know it's more of the same horseshit. And even like with the with the cold fusion thing. We can't call it cold fusion because everybody knows that that doesn't work. So we're gonna rebrand it and as soon as there's a rebranding you just go nope.

S: It's desperation.

G: Desperation, yeah, like they themselves know how silly it is on some level that we can't call it the thing we've been calling it for 30 years because everyone knows it's BS. It's amazing.

S: All right.

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Science or Fiction (1:44:34)

Theme: The number 1000 Item #1: There are roughly 1000 stars within 45 light years of Earth. Item #2: A recent census of a 430m2 urban property (in Brisbane, AU) found over 1000 macroscopic species. Item #3: In 2021 the median household income in the world was just over $1,000.

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts too real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. And during live shows we get to pull the audience to. George will do his one clap thing. Okay, there's a theme this week. Does anybody want to guess the theme?

C: Pizza.

E: Richard Wiseman.

J: The number 1,000.

S: The number 1,000 is the theme. Good job Jay. Number 1,000. Here we go. Item number one. There are roughly 1,000 stars within 45 light-years of Earth. Item number two, a recent census of a 430 square meter urban property in Brisbane, Australia found over 1,000 macroscopic species. Basically in one property one yard with a house, 1,000 macroscopic species. And item number three. In 2021 the median household income in the world was just over $1,000. Okay. Per year. Per year, per year. No, in the world, per year. Let's start at the Evan and end of the table.

Evan's Response

E: Okay, a thousand stars within 45 light-years of Earth. That seems high at first thought. You think of the closest star besides our own is what 4.3 light-years away. That's the closest. That's number one. To find number two you go out a little bit further than that.

J: You're going to do 1000 stars. Number 917. I mean those guys there's there's definitely a life there.

E: I'm trying to establish a pattern if there is a pattern to be established here. So if that played out equally what that would be a thousand- to get to a thousand stars you would need 45. Yeah, actually that would work out, right? 4.3 light-years. Yeah, so the math works on that one. That's I think-

B: Really?

E: Yeah, and so I have a feeling that one's going to be science. The second one, okay this property in Brisbane, Australia. A thousand mac macroscopic species. Macroscopic? That's also a lot. That seems like too many, because wouldn't some of these things be eating each other and therefore you wouldn't find them. Unless we're talking about like the remains of some. We're talking about a live things Steve? These are things are all alive? These thousand macroscopic species are all alive at the same time?

S: Living things at the same time.

E: Living in a square that's 430 meters by 430 meters.

S: No. 430 square meters. So it's like 10 by 43, right?

C: How many square feet is it?

E: I don't know, that that seems high. The last one, I have no idea. The median household in the world. I mean my gosh, there are some places in which the poverty is beyond even your wildest thoughts. It's so low. So to say it's just over a thousand, I have a feeling sadly that one's going to turn out to be true. I will say the macroscopic species one is the fiction.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Something's rubbing me wrong about the stars. I know there's how many stars are visible at night? It's a three thousand, four thousand, five thousand? But not not much more than that. And those stars are very, relatively close to our sun. I mean every almost everything you see out there is if this is the this is the galaxy and we're right here. The stars you're seeing are like a tiny little dot. But that dot I think is a lot bigger than 45 light years. So probably wrong with this, but I'm just going to just go with my gut and say that that's not quite right. And say I'll say number one the stars visible. It's fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay's Response

J: All right, so I've learned lots of things from doing this show and one of them is that life is teeming in Australia. And that there's tons of bugs and these got to be bugs so that one is science. Unfortunately, a lot of people in the United States, going on to the third one here. There's a lot of people don't even have any income. So I think that one is science. I'm going to go with Bob and say that number one about the stars, that one is fiction.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: So this is tough because I'm trying to use Steve psychology here. Usually the rule is an order of magnitude, right?

S: It's a guideline more than a rule. (laughter)

G: It's more of a feeling.

C: The plot thickens. Okay, well because my reasoning was is it a hundred or is it ten thousand. And which of those seem more reasonable to go in one direction or the other? I think the median income across the globe is not ten thousand USD. I think that's too high and I think a hundred is too low. So I'm gonna cross that one off. I think he's stressing out right now. So then the question is-

J: Cara, Steve just had a tell. Steve just did a rare tell the audience picked up on it.

C: I didn't see it. I think that so so now it's the stars versus the species. I think the species I have more confidence in my knowledge about something like this. The stars I'm not confident in at all. Two people have gone with the stars. That's Bob and Jay. Bob having led the charge makes me nervous. No, because-

B: Like it always should.

C: If it's an astronomy thing and Bob said, he knows his shit.

B: But I make my mistakes.

C: But I think the thing though is like that's small when you say an urban property of 430, that's like what a thousand square? It's small and I'm thinking yes, there is a stereotype that Australia had and it's true but Brisbane is a city. That doesn't mean that there aren't but I don't know, a thousand different bugs there. I don't know, that one feels high. Although 100 feels low. Might be 500. But I think I'm gonna go with Evan on this one and I'm gonna say it's not the insects. Yeah, the species.

S: All right, George.

George's Response

G: I was leaning towards the median income one but you said just over a thousand as opposed to around a thousand or a thousand which makes me feel like it's an actual number of like 11, 15 or something like that. But I do agree with Cara about the thousand bugs. Thousand bugs on a four football field size. I could see that being, I'm gonna go with the median household income. I shouldn't.

C: No sweep.

E: That is bold.

G: Because it's probably lower, it's probably like really sad and lower.

Audience's Response

S: We're going to poll the audience and see which rouge you thought was the most persuasive and also just which one you think is the fiction. Do you want to do the thing?

G: All right, which is yeah, if you think the first one is the fiction the light years, here we go. Okay, if you think the second one is the fiction, here we go. Pretty close. And if it's the household income is the fiction.

S: So I think yeah, one and two were tied, three was way behind. So it's George and a minority of the audience.

G: A very attractive intelligent minority.

E: Well, they're all minority.

S: Let's just take them in order. You can't defer anything from that.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: There are roughly 1 000 stars within 45 light years of earth. Evan, you think that one is science.

E: Yeah.

S: Bob and Jay think it's fiction. Cara and George think it's science. About 40% of the audience think this one science? This one is science. And Evan you nailed it. The math does work out. Because if you think about it this way, the nearest star is 4.5 light years. So if you put each star in a box, that's 4.5 light years and you go out 45 light years. That's 10 by 10 by 10 is a thousand. There's a thousand boxes with stars in them.

E: My god, it's full of stars.

S: And that turns out to be the roughly the answer. There's about a thousand stars within 45 light years. Bob got screwed up because of why? He was confusing stars with visible stars. So most of these stars are not naked eye visible because they're red dwarfs.

B: So I was kind of right in my thinking.

S: Yeah, the thinking was right but you just confused visible stars with stars.

J: My excuse is Bob completely failed me I said to myself whatever Bob goes with I'm doing it and you're never going to do it. Never is this going to happen again.

E: The next thousand episodes.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right, let's go to number two. A recent census of a 430 square meter urban property in Brisbane, Australia found over 1 000 macroscopic species. Evan and Cara think this one is the fiction. A lot of the audience thinks this one is the fiction. And this one is.

J: Watermelon is no longer an anomaly people. Ian has shit timing. That's it. That's what we learned today. Fuck science or fiction. It's all about Ian.

S: Are we recording me? Do I need to repeat anything?

G: We just started recording.

E: And go.

S: A recent census of a 430 square meter urban property in Brisbane, Australia found over 1 000 macroscopic species. Evan and Cara think this one is the fiction. About 40 percent of the audience think this one is the fiction. And this one is science.

E: No! George!

S: No, it's not his first win, I think it's his first solo win.

G: [inaudible] thousand shows.

E: It only took a thousand George.

J: George you landed, you nailed the landing man. Good job, brother.

G: Oh my god.

S: So there are a thousand distinct species in this property in Brisbane, Australia. They're all spiders. They're mostly flies.

J: We're freaking talking about Australia.

S: There's lots of bugs. There's some worms. There's a lot of mammals. There's snails and stuff. But yeah a thousand. It's just a lot more than you think.

G: We have an australian person in the audience. Did we fool you or no? No brizzy's not a city, I love it. How do you say like the word no? I love it.

S: Whatever, Brisbane. According to the paper it was urban. So they, the researchers felt that Brisbane was urban. You can call that whatever you want.

C: There's like six big cities. That's one of them, right?

S: There's a lot more stuff living in the city than you think. Especially the small stuff, but it was stuff they could see with the naked eye. Because you can't count bacteria. How many different species of bacteria do you think are in the average person?

B: Oh my god.

S: About a thousand.

C: About a thousand. That's the one you didn't use.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right, this means that in 2021 the median household income in the world was just over a thousand dollars per year is the fiction. So congratulations George.

G: What, is it lower?

E: I hope it's better.

C: But it's not an order of magnitude lower.

S: You think it's lower?

C: I think-

S: Lower or higher?

E: I hope it's higher.

S: It's about ten thousand. It's about nine thousand and something. It's almost ten thousand.

J: And to think that when the people clapped with George and I'm sitting here going they're idiots.

S: I figured people would be the best give the pessimistic things. There are charts that have like every country and their median income. And yeah, it starts in the like forty-fifty thousand range for the western industrialized, wealthy nations. And then it goes down from there and there are a lot in the like the several thousand, ten thousand range and several thousand some are below a thousand. And the hundred, several hundred dollars, that's your average income obviously very very poor countries, but of course this is averaged by population. So it all averages out to around ten thousand dollars per year, which again is nothing when you think about it.

C: It doesn't average- the median. Different measures.

G: So we paid Bill Nye to do the bit. 10 grand every time, he wants 10 grand, Bill Nye wants 10 grand. All right. Hey Bill Nye 10 grand. All right bow tie. What are we gonna say? Bill Nye gets. I don't know why I'm on Jackie Mason all of a sudden.

S: But George I appreciate it when people have the courage to strike out on their own and not just follow the crowd and it pays off.

G: One in a thousand it'll pay off.

S: All right, so, guys that's 1 000 episodes. (applasue)

Skeptical Quote of the Week (2:00:04)

(quoted text)  – (author of quote), (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, you must have chosen an awesome quote to close out our one thousand episode.

G: From an awesome, awesome human being. "At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes and openness to new ideas no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be. And the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." Carl Cagan from the Demon Haunted World.

S: Very nice. I love that quote. That essence right there. That was Carl Sagan. That two worlds living together. The excitement over the new possibilities married to ruthless skepticism. We try to capture that. It's hard to convey sometimes. That's why I get so annoyed when people say you're closed-minded like no, we're not you have no idea what you're talking about. We are open to everything. We just follow the evidence. You're close to the evidence because you have a true belief system. That's closed-minded. This is the model that we follow, right? It's like we're open to and I could be convinced of anything if the evidence is proportionate to the claim. That's it. That's all it takes.

G: And the world is amazing enough.

S: It's amazing.

G: Reality is is so stupidly amazing, it's enough. Enjoy it. Dive into it, find it, discover it.

S: And he's so right that this is it's a process. We're slowly slowly winnowing something that's more accurate than not from utter nonsense. And if you don't do that process you are left wallowing in utter nonsense.

J: Let's face it, if you want to live in a fantasy world, why pick some shitty religion? What about Lord of the Rings or Star Trek? So much better.

S: So you're saying you would rather roleplay tabletop than then join a religion?

J: I just want to know what reality is and then pick my fantasy.

S: Yeah.

J: I don't want someone to tell me what my fantasy is.

S: We often do say that though, when we're reviewing people who are in a cult or we're in a UFO thing or whatever. That's their entertainment, right? And we often say they just these people need to play a LARP.

J: They need to play tabletop.

E: How do you think I met the Novellas? LARP.

S: Yeah, seriously, they need a fantasy life for entertainment that they know is fantasy and keep that separate from reality. But they mix the two, which creates a lot of nonsense a lot of mischief.

G: Here, here.

S: All right, so thank you all for joining us for our thousandth episode. (applause)

Signoff

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

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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Today I Learned

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