SGU Episode 1015

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SGU Episode 1015
December 21st 2024
Ancient artifact with inscriptions, highlighting early human communication and creativity.
SGU 1014                      SGU 1016
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
America's leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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Show Notes
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Intro

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Saturday, December 7th, 2024 and this is your host. Steven Novella. It was a little weak. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello Washington, DC.

S: ...and George Hrab.

G: Chestnuts Roasting. Hey.

S: So yeah, we are in Washington, DC, our nation's capital. Actually lived here for five years. It's a very nice city. We came back to record our live show here.

News Items

The Science of Tipping (01:11)

• Experiment Reveals How Pressure to Tip Can Unexpectedly Backfire : ScienceAlert 

S: So we are going to get into some news items. We're going to do a little bit of a Q&A halfway through the show. Have you guys all submitted your questions? So Cara.

C: Yes.

S: How do we get how do if you live off tips, how do you get people to tip more?

C: So I'm going to answer not that question today, but I thought I was going to be answering that question, but it turns out it's much more complicated than that. So a recent study that was published in the Journal of Business Research, I love these online publications because it says it was published in January 2025. I'm not sure how that happened.

S: They always, they do usually date the publication the month after it comes out so it's relevant longer.

C: It's so weird.

S: Dated the moment it hits the shelves.

C: Cheaters. So these researchers who actually focus their research, their marketing professors and they study digital tipping, which is really interesting. We started to talk about this amongst ourselves last night at dinner and there were feelings. There were lots of feelings about tipping. They wanted to understand how customers respond to what they call tip surveillance. So there are quite a few studies looking at when and how customers are more likely to tip more or to tip less. And what's interesting is that the research is sort of all over the place, but they were interested in not just tipping, but what they call non tip measures. So how does it impact a customer, let's say, coming back to this place again in the future or recommending this place to friends or family members, but also tipping. And they were interested specifically in something that they call tipping privacy. So they ran a few different experiments. They looked at 36,000 kind of field transactions and then they did 4 controlled experiments with 1100 participants and they compared setups that they kind of deemed had different levels of privacy. So handheld versus countertop payment systems, point of sale POS systems. They looked at times when employees look at you while you're tipping or when they turn away or walk away. And they also looked at point of sale systems that either show the tips to employees and like you were asking about this just last night right away because you were like, do they know like what it's facing me? Do they know?

J: I bought my kids hamburgers. This my wife is away. Long story. I'm like, OK, Wednesday night I'm super busy. I get the kids hamburgers right, so I go to five guys.

S: You're a terrible father.

J: Well, I did not get the milkshakes, so I am not a terrible father.

S: You're redeemed.

J: So I'm right there. And I'm like typical scene. I'm buying them. I'm paying. And then the tip thing comes up. And I have that thing where I'm like, shit. She's standing right there. I'm like, I don't usually tip people like this. This is not where I tip people.

S: At a counter, yeah.

J: At a counter, at a fast food restaurant. They're getting paid a wage. It's not like they're underpaid.

S: Yeah, you don't tip the person at McDonald's like that.

J: The thing I didn't like, and I told Dekera, was I felt like she knew I didn't tip. Because she gave me, I probably thought about it.

S: She gave you the stink eye?

J: She gave me some type of stink eye that was there or not. It could have been produced in my head. But I felt guilty. And in that moment, I'm like, that sucks. It really was uncomfortable for me.

S: So I do think tipping should be basically anonymous. But I have to tell you about Perry's Tip-O-Meter. Have you ever heard about this story?

E: I'll take half credit for that.

S: All right. Everyone gets half credit. Perry had this idea. He wanted to create this product. You call it the Tip-O-Meter. He talked about it every time you went to a restaurant. And it's basically like, imagine a little cardboard thing you put on the table. It's got a dial that goes from 0% to whatever, 30%. And you set it. And as the service throughout the meal, you raise or lower the Tip-O-Meter based on their performance.

C: Yeah, so it's flipping the script back on them. They are watching.

S: You're being transparent about how much tip they're getting, and you will change it. So if they're late, like the Tip-O-Meter is going down. So since then, we always, like whenever there's any bad service at a meal, we're always like, oh, there goes the Tip-O-Meter. It's going down.

B: I can see Perry actually waiting for them to come in front of them while looking at them, moving the Tip-O-Meter back down.

C: And so this would have been an era where the most common place to tip was at a full-service restaurant. And now you tip for everything.

J: I know. Ridiculous.

C: Everything. And that's really what these researchers were interested in is the fact that this kind of like tipping economy has become really large. And they were looking at it from a psychological perspective. So they were looking at different constructs, things that they called perceived control and perceived generosity. And they found that when somebody had diminished perceived control, so when they felt like they had less control over the situation, they actually tended to tip more. But when they had diminished perceived generosity, they tended to tip less. But overall, they found that less privacy means better non-tip responses. So the impact on how much people tipped was actually kind of wiggly. Because as you can imagine, if somebody's staring at you, you might feel guilted into tipping more or you might be angry and tip less. But you're less likely to come back. You're less likely to be a repeat customer. You're less likely to tell people that they should go to this place. And so they looked at all of these non-tip responses that actually haven't really been researched in the literature. And they found that overall, from a business perspective, if you don't give somebody privacy while they tip, it's bad for business.

S: That's good.

C: But the industry generally thinks and has been operating under a principle that reducing privacy increases tips. But just because that's sometimes the case, in the long run, it probably will reduce business. So it's an interesting phenomenon, right? Do you want somebody to tip because they feel guilty?

J: Yeah. I would think as a rule of thumb, anytime you are knowingly letting your customer feel uncomfortable during the process of dealing with that business, that's bad. Because again, that moment I had at Five Guys, again, I have a lot of hamburger joints I can go to. I don't want to stand there and feel weird buying a hamburger for my kid.

C: And to be fair, the employees in this study, they talk about how employees feel weird about that too. Like they don't enjoy it. It's uncomfortable for them. And in asking a lot of employees in previous studies, a lot of employees don't really know what the policy is or how they're supposed to act during that point of sale process. But just for a little bit of context, because I didn't mention this at the top, digital tipping is practiced in over 100 countries. And in the United States alone, just tips, $153.4 billion a year and $54.2 billion of that via like a digital point of sale. So lots of money there.

S: Recorded.

C: That's reported. That's reported, yeah.

E: There's all kinds of cash tips that goes unreported. Probably double, I would think, almost.

J: I don't know if other people feel this way but I'm never in a – I'm being tipped situation, right? So I feel kind of that sucks.

C: But we are tipped through Patreon.

J: But you don't have an answer for that.

C: But isn't Patreon like tipping for us?

J: No, they're getting a service.

S: Well, we get tipped when we do our live stream. People literally tip us.

C: Should we put a point of sale up?

J: Yeah, but have you ever seen any of that money?

S: No.

J: Yeah, because Ian is in charge of that money.

S: That's true.

C: Ian, did you add a tip line to – no?

S: I would be happy if just all tipping got eliminated.

J: Get rid of it. Just pay people a little bit more.

S: I mean does it really serve a purpose at this point other than to–

J: It saves the employer money.

S: It saves the employer money. That's what I'm saying.

C: Yeah.

E: It allows them to hire people that are on the wager list.

S: Ostensibly, the idea is like with the tip-o-meter, like you are improving your quality of service because that is directly tied to how much money the server is going to make. Have any of you guys ever like deliberately left a really low tip as an FU to the server?

E: I've seen that happen.

C: No.

S: Because really, really bad service.

E: I've never done it but I've seen it happen.

C: I can't do it.

E: I can't remember, yeah. It's a statement.

B: I can't remember ever doing that.

C: I'm just at a place now where I just tip flat every single time. I tip 20 percent on everything no matter what it is.

J: No way.

B: Do you ever go above that? Do you ever go above that?

C: Yeah, I've definitely gone above that. But it would be nice to be in a culture where everybody is paid an appropriate living wage and a tip is never expected but it's welcome when somebody does something exceptional. Like that would be lovely.

E: And most of Europe has this. I think this is primarily an American phenomenon.

C: Well, 100 countries.

E: That's the electric tip. That's the e-tipping that you talked about.

C: Yeah. But e-tipping is not –

E: But customary in my understanding is that most European countries did not have this tipping culture even before the e-tip or anything else.

C: Yeah. Some do. Some don't. And they have different levels of what's an expected tip. But it's increasingly expected across the globe. Like that's the thing. We're only seeing this ticking up.

J: There's lots of unanswered questions here. Well, first of all, we're not informed. Like when I went into that five guys, I don't know how much that person is making. I honestly don't know if like you're supposed to tip now.

S: I know. It's complicated. It's something I ask. Like when I went to the EAU, I'd never been there before, right? I went to Dubai. And my first encounter with a potentially tippable situation the driver running from the airport. I'm like, do people tip in this country? You know, he said yes. I don't know if that's true or not. It's like, oh, yes. We get tipped. But whatever.

C: We get 70% tips.

S: I ask.

C: Yeah, you can ask. And you can do that research beforehand. You know, I am seeing – I live in L.A. So I live in a large metropolitan city like D.C. And at some like nicer restaurants, I do notice that there will be on the ticket, in order to provide a living wage or blah, blah, blah, we have this set fee, anything additional you can pay above it. Sometimes I kind of like that clarity. You know what I mean? Like this is just how much it is for you to dine here. It would be nice though if it was like just pay them more. But I guess they can't afford to.

S: And sometimes like both of our meals at our hotel so far this weekend, they add the tip automatically. Like it's not even a choice. They just add it in.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

S: Yeah. So that's the same thing. Just add it to the price.

C: Yeah, no, totally. And we're one of the only countries in the world where we have to calculate our own tax. Like most countries, the price on the thing includes the VAT. It's super weird that we – when people come here, they're like, why did it cost more than it said it would cost? Yeah, yeah. Sorry.

G: There was a great Simpsons episode where part of Springfield got rid of tipping and Homer like moved there and bought that. And there's a whole thing about it. It actually addressed all these issues. It was really cool.

C: Yeah. I have like some really dear friends that live in Oregon. I went there for the Thanksgiving holiday and I sometimes visit up there. And I do like to buy like upgrades for my truck while I'm there because they don't have sales tax. And it's like a huge difference.

JonBenet Ramsey Case (11:55)

• JonBenet Ramsey: What we know about the child beauty queen’s death, the botched investigation and decades of mystery 

S: Guys know who this person is on the screen? Anybody know who that is? JonBenet Ramsey. She was murdered in 1996 at – around Christmas. So around this time of year. I deliberately used a picture of her not made up for the –

G: Pageants.

S: The pageants. Yeah. Because that's always the picture – like this is a brief portion, small slice of her life. That's all everyone knows about her. But anyway, there's a renewed interest in this case. This is like one of the most famous murders in America. It's still unsolved. And it's really – there's a lot of interesting skeptical lessons in this case that I thought would be fun to go over. But first, I want to survey the audience about their attitudes. So based upon what you know about this case, and you may not have thought about this for 20 years, based upon your memory and your knowledge. George, you're going to do the one thing.

G: Sure.

S: If you think the family was in any way involved with her murder, then clap when George does the clap thing. If you think that the family was not in any way involved, clap. If you think that there was an intruder unrelated to the family that murdered her, clap. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, clap.

G: And if you murdered JonBenet, clap.

E: It has been a while.

B: Worth a shot.

G: Worth a shot.

S: Do you guys have any strong opinions on the panel about this case?

C: I haven't really followed it.

E: It's been a while.

C: There's like some new documentaries and stuff.

G: At the time, the family just seemed so creepy and weird at the time. I remember thinking like, okay, don't – just because someone's creepy and weird doesn't mean they're capable.

S: The family seemed creepy and weird. It was weird stuff.

G: But that doesn't mean that they're capable of that kind of a crime.

C: True.

G: And you had to keep reminding yourself like, no, creepy, weird people don't necessarily automatically kill their children.

C: But it's usually the family, right?

S: Of course.

E: Well, right. The family is the closest-

S: Statistically, yes.

E: You have to investigate the family. You have to.

C: I think I actually was just reading an article that like statistically the home is the most dangerous place for a woman, right? Like by leaps and bounds.

J: Why is that?

E: Well, because they're home most of the time.

C: Because of intimate partner violence. No, like it's the most – the most violence perpetrated against women are perpetrated by fathers, husbands, cousins, things like that.

S: Rather than just strangers.

J: That's terrible. I didn't know that.

C: I know. It is terrible. And most people don't know that.

S: Having lived through this, definitely, if you read the – even just the mainstream news reporting about this case, there was this sense that there was something going on in the family. There was something weird going on here. And there was a lot of details that were dropped by the police to the media to indicate that. It's all complete bullshit. The interesting thing was this whole controversy was generated by the police who were grossly incompetent in their investigation of the case. And the tabloid media. So they basically fed the tabloid media. And interestingly, again, I don't know if you remember this at the time, but this is the late 1990s. This was a time in American culture where daytime TV was just going crazy, right? This is before social media hit. And there was this competition for shock daytime television, right? And so this mainstream media trend sort of – it basically took the tabloid reporting of the misinformation coming from the police and just ranked speculation by amateurs and parlayed that into this whole story. But it was vapor. It was nothing. And now, like, looking back on it, you could say, well, look, what are the actual facts of the case? And George, you're right. You have to remind yourself to be skeptical about this sort of stuff. So to quickly review the details the night of Christmas, her family was out for dinner. They came back. Everyone went to bed. You know, the mother, Patsy Ramsey, was the first to get up the next morning. She's coming down the stairs and there's pieces of paper on the staircase. Turns out it was a ransom note. It was a really weird ransom note. It was genuinely a weird ransom note. Very long, kind of rambling, asking for a very weird specific amount of money, $118,000. There were lots of themes in there that kind of echo movie themes. So the mother reads this, panics, runs up to her daughter's room. She's not there. She calls 911, says there's been a kidnapping. You know, the family searches the house. They don't find her. The police come and they're treating it like a kidnapping, right? But they're immediately suspicious of the parents for whatever reason. Again, just statistically speaking. There's also, this is in Boulder, Colorado. They get about one murder per year there.

C: That's it in Boulder?

S: That's it.

C: Wow. Safe place.

S: So they don't have a lot of experience with these kinds of situations. And so they're treating it like a kidnapping. They allow people are coming and going inside the house. They're friends. You know, the priest come over. And, like, the time frame of the, when they're supposed to be getting, hearing from the kidnappers is approaching. At one point, a few hours later, there's just one police officer left in the house with the father and a friend. And, like, just to keep them busy, she says, why don't you guys search the house again? So the father, John Ramsey, and a friend go, they start in the basement. They notice a few things that are odd. There's a window that's broken. There's another window to the outside that's open. There's a suitcase under the window that doesn't belong there, as if somebody used it as a stepping platform to get up to the window. They go to a closed door in the back of the basement, and her body's behind that door, right? So the father's the one to find her. He panics, because, of course, he did. Pulled off, like, the tape from her mouth and grabbed her, brought her up, completely destroyed the crime scene, right, and brought her upstairs. So now it's a murder investigation. So that's the basic facts of the case. Now, the police officers, the Boulder police officers, immediately think, oh, this is like, most of the cases, it's the family, right? So they start trying to build this case against the family, that it was either the mother or the father. The real skeptical lesson this happens over and over again with high-profile cases, and it's always interesting to watch really well-done documentaries of the fact where you have, like, when, like, actual professionals finally come on the scene and do actual investigation, and you look at the hard evidence, and you see that these police officers basically just had a conspiracy theory, and they were using, they were violating every law of skepticism, critical thinking, and good investigation to shoehorn the evidence into their pet theory. So we have, like, this incredible speculation, and we have some hard evidence where we could say pretty confidently some pieces to this puzzle. So one piece of very hard evidence is the autopsy, right? So that's pretty solid evidence. The autopsy showed that...

J: This is going to be harsh, by the way.

S: It's harsh. Guys, you know the case. This is a terrible, terrible case. I won't necessarily have to tell you the worst details, but basically she was strangled while she was alive, and she had a head wound, either one of which could have killed her, right? The strangulation could have killed her. The head wound could have killed her. So the pathologist has said they both contributed to her death. But it's critical that she was being strangled while she was alive, right? That's critical to understanding the case. They also found that she was sexually assaulted, and that there was samples. There was saliva, DNA on multiple parts of her clothing whatever. So there's basically two theories of this case, two broad theories of this case. One is that someone in the family did this. And the police didn't think that somebody in the family sexually abused her necessarily. The theory was that someone in the family killed her and then staged the whole scene to cover up an accidental killing or a killing in rage or whatever. The other theory is that there was an intruder that came in the house, kidnapped her.

J: But it was a premeditated ransom note there, though. Is that correct?

S: Yeah.

J: And I'm sure that they did, like, the handwriting thing.

S: There's so many details in this case. So the handwriting doesn't match anybody in the house. One of the things the tabloids ran with was that, again, there was a lot of fake experts came out of the woodwork to make lots of just BS kind of pronouncements. So Patsy Ramsey was ruled out multiple times by forensic analysis of the handwriting. But then you have somebody who's not really an expert says, well, there's features in there that she could have been disguising her handwriting. So it's this special pleading, right? It's like, well, it doesn't match her handwriting. Well, she was disguising her handwriting. And maybe she wrote it with her left hand or whatever. That gets out in the tabloid as they've matched the handwriting to Patsy Ramsey, right? But it was nonsense. It was always nonsense.

C: Why don't we start with the DNA evidence?

S: Yeah, so the DNA evidence is incredibly important. So they found DNA. And using the technology at the time, they were able to type it. And it's a male DNA. Male Caucasian DNA was their conclusion. But it didn't match anybody in the family, didn't match anybody associated in the neighbors, anybody on their long list of potential people associated with the crime. The Boulder police said, eh, it could have been just contamination.

B: Wow.

S: Unfortunately, their own incompetence makes that not unlikely.

B: Oh, wow.

C: I thought it was a semen sample.

S: No semen. There was no semen. But there were fluids. But no semen.

J: Wait, they think a sailor killed her?

S: So think about this. They dismiss one of the most ironclad pieces of evidence in the case.

C: Yeah, like that's what the Innocence Project uses now to exonerate people who are falsely.

S: So that was in 2003 they got the DNA analysis. In 2008, they did further DNA analysis using a new technique called trace DNA or touch DNA, where you could use even just a few skin cells to get DNA, right? And they found DNA on her pajamas matching the DNA that was found in the crotch of her underwear, which, as one researcher put it, there is no innocent explanation, right, for your DNA being in the crotch of a six-year-old's underwear. There's no innocent explanation for that, right?

C: And it was all from an unknown male?

S: From an unknown male. But that matched the DNA on the pajamas. Now they have two independent DNA samples from the same person.

J: I know not to really try to focus on something irrelevant, but like I fold my kids' laundry.

S: But you're the father.

C: But you're the father. This is an unknown male.

S: So the family was excluded. If it was the father, he would say I dressed her and whatever. You could say maybe-

J: There's no foreign person. Their DNA shouldn't be in the house, let alone in her underwear.

S: And on her clothes.

C: Assuming it didn't match anything in a database.

S: Didn't match anything in the database either. So again, that led the Colorado DA to write a letter of apology to the Ramseys for ever putting suspicion on them. Like you're excluded 100%.

J: And this was 20 years later?

S: No. This is 2008.

J: So 30 years later.

C: 10 years later.

S: No. That was 12 years later.

J: Oh, I thought it happened in the 80s. I'm sorry.

S: 96.

J: I'm off by a decade. Sorry.

S: But the police were relentless in their theory that one of the Ramseys did it. So one of the police officers, his theory was, this is just ridiculous, that the mother, in a fit of rage, which is in no part of her history as a human being, in a fit of rage, killed her daughter because she wet the bed. And then they staged everything to cover it up. So they say, well, the staging theory fails because, what did I say? She was strangulated while she was alive. Right? So if your theory is that she was hit in the head, either there was that theory and then there was a theory that the brother, Burke, hit her in the head with a flashlight because she stole his snacks. Again, these are ridiculous theories. And if you have a theory that there was some fatal violent act, that usually happens in the context of other physical abuse. Right? There was no history of physical abuse in this family, in this girl's life. There was no history of violence in the mother, in the brother. Nothing. There's nothing. This completely would be an isolated incident. So they say, well, if she was alive while she was strangulated and they did the strangulation to cover up and actually whatever, the blow to the head, how did that work out? So they said, well, maybe she didn't realize she was still alive when she strangulated her to stage the outside predator.

J: Steve, I have a question.

S: So that's like the mother of all special pleas.

J: Is strangulated a real word?

S: Yeah. Strangulated.

J: Does it sound weird to anybody else?

B: Yeah.

C: Strangled?

J: Strangulated sounds like something like Bugs Bunny would say. Seriously. I strangulated. Is that real?

S: It's real. Strangulation.

J: Strangulated, though, sounds weird. I don't think you should say it anymore.

C: It's because we usually say strangled.

S: It's a technical medical term, Jay.

J: All right.

C: What I'm hearing, though, is kind of a larger sociologic issue, which is very American, or maybe we can even say very Western, which is this tendency for individuals in positions of authority to not be willing to change course. That somehow that leads to blowback or feedback that they are incompetent or that they aren't strong or these other sort of like toxic. But ultimately these kinds of tendencies are bigger than the police, right, and they're bigger than politicians and they're bigger than you and me. But it's like an American ethos that sort of poisons everything.

G: Why is it so appealing? Appealing is the wrong word, but there is this fascination with the idea that, like, a mother could do this. I mean, there's entire networks on television that are dedicated to murder, these weird murder stories. Like, what is it about us?

C: Well, mothers can do this.

G: Absolutely. No question.

C: Fathers do it more often, but mothers can do it.

G: No question. I'm saying a relative. That you want to hear that. It's a more of a story of a random person kind of breaking in and that's a horrible thing that you'd be interested in, but when it turns out it's this perfect family and the father was actually this, like, why is that?

S: Because you watch the movies, right?

C: But that's interesting because I see it the other way around. It is most often the family, but people tend to be really obsessed and they tend to assume that random violence is more common and they're more afraid of strangers, but that's not the case usually. I think people are just morbidly curious about, like, people watch murder shows before they go to sleep. My view is it's about mortality salience, right? Like, we're a very death-denying culture, but everybody's fascinated with death because we're all going to die and it's, like, really existentially threatening, and so we find safe ways to exercise that curiosity. And weirdly, true crime has become, like, a very lucrative.

G: Is it a desire for justice too on some part? Like, where you feel like, okay, when these monsters are caught, and then it's like, okay, someone's in charge, someone's taking care of this however they get caught. I wonder if that's part of it too.

C: And also, again, an American ethic of, like, stranger danger. Like, not a lot of other cultures really dig into this the way that we do, so if we can keep everybody scared of their neighbours and then everybody's on kind of high alert, but then, ooh, the bad guy went away, oh, justice has been restored and now I can sleep well at night. I think there's a motive for that.

S: I think in this case there was pressure to, like, play down the intruder and, like, even the mayor of Boulder was like, we have no intruder wandering around the streets of Boulder.

C: Yeah, because they don;t want public opinion to-

G: The beaches are safe.

S: So she threw the family under the bus in order to say our city is safe, basically.

B: Wow.

J: That's infuriating.

S: It was infuriating. And I was infuriated by the fact that it's like, oh, shit, I bought into this 30, whatever, 20-something years ago. It's a really good lesson.

G: I mean, look, half the audience clapped at the panel. And it's not your fault.

S: And the thing is because the information was coming from the police and not the tabloids, but, like, actual mainstream media, and, again, at the time I didn't – I had not an insufficient awareness of how absolutely incompetent police can be, especially when they're not – this is not what they do, right? This is unusual. This was – they were all out of their depth. I mean, again, they blew it from the get-go. You tell the father to go search the house. One of the police officers went down into the basement, saw the broken window, went over to that door, saw that the door was locked from the inside and didn't open it because he's like, well, if there were an intruder, he didn't get out this way. It didn't open the door that her body was behind, just incompetence, just gross incompetence.

C: But also the media the media response to that is the reason. It's like, yes, there's gross incompetence, and that's the reason that everything failed here. But the media response is the reason that you, looking back, are like, oh, I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

S: Oh, totally.

E: Oh, gosh.

S: But the thing is even if you were trying to be, like, again, dismissing the tabloids and going, well, what are the police saying? The police were feeding misinformation to the media deliberately to point a finger at the family because they were frustrated that the DA wasn't pursuing the case because the DA was like, you have nothing. I can't – in fact, there was a grand jury indicted them.

J: The parents?

S: The parents.

B: Indicted.

S: Indicted them, but the DA was like – the DA just said we're not going forward with the case and it didn't come out until, like, five years later that they actually voted to indict the parents.

C: That's interesting.

S: But the DA said it would be unethical to pursue a case I know I can't win.

C: Yeah.

S: We do not have the evidence here.

E: Of course it would.

C: But what's interesting to me – I mean, that is an interesting phenomenon and it's a huge bummer and worrisome that it probably happens a lot more often than we'd like to admit. But the media narrative, I think about the – and, like, however you feel about it, fine. I'm not going to open that can of worms. But the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trials and watching the documentary special where they literally just showed transcripts and they showed what happened in court and they showed kind of his perspective and her perspective and she was eaten by the media, like, just ruined by the media. And then when you watch what actually transpired, you're like, oh, my God, that was all narrative.

S: It was all narrative.

C: It was all narrative.

S: So here – one of the layers of this case is that – was the pageant thing. And so the tabloids ran with endless pictures of her dolled up in a little girl pageant. And then everyone got judgy about that. Everyone was like, oh, what kind of parents would sex up their daughter like that? It's like first of all, they had a normal life. The mother was into pageantry when she was younger. Natural to have the same thing with your daughter. In the audience were all family members. Anybody who's parents here you go to an event where your kid's doing anything performative, it's all parents in the audience. That's what was going on. But they parlayed that into there's something sick going on here, but it was really ridiculous. But it was great tabloid pictures, great tabloid headlines.

J: Did the police ever get called out on this?

S: Totally. Well, first of all, there were two lawsuits at least in this case. So one of the investigating detectives had the theory that Patsy Ramsey killed her and then staged everything and dismissed the DNA, dismissed a lot of evidence. And they also, I mean, there was no tracks in the snow. I'll circle back to your point. And it turns out – so what's interesting was that the DA and the police did not get a law. The DA said, you guys are screwing this up. I don't agree with your theory of the case. The police were frustrated that the DA wasn't pursuing their theory of the case, which is that the family did it. The DA called in, out of retirement, a really highly respected investigator. And this was Lou Smith. And he completely investigated the case and was like, this was an outside intruder. Hello. There was so many signs of an outside intruder. But one of the things was the police said there's no tracks in the snow. They looked at pictures of the house. There's no snow around the house.

E: Well, they weren't lying in a way.

S: There was no snow. There was like a dusting on like one side, whatever. But you could easily get to and from the house without ever passing through snow. That was the level of incompetence that we were dealing with. But they fed that to the media. Police say no tracks means it was an inside job.

J: And I believe that if they were competent, they could have caught the killer.

S: Well, yeah, maybe. The only way to really catch the killer is through DNA. We'll get to that when I finish up. But so there was a lawsuit against that detective who wrote a whole book saying Patsy Ramsey did it basically that was settled for undisclosed amount but almost certainly in the millions. And then Geraldo Rivera did a mock trial where they basically said that the brother Burke did it, which is ridiculous. He got sued. CBS got sued, like whatever else. The producers got sued. Again, settled for undisclosed amount, again, almost certainly in the millions. So there were successful lawsuits, settled lawsuits. Because the family was – they were destroyed.

C: Yeah, how sad that they had to do that. I'm sure they didn't want to have to sue.

S: Of course not. They were just – they spent all their money defending themselves on private investigators, everything. It was just – they were completely destroyed by the media.

C: They never got to appropriately mourn the loss of their daughter.

S: No.

C: It was immediate. It was terrible.

G: It's the tail end of the whole satanic panic thing.

S: Yeah, it's like the satanic panic.

G: Late 80s into the early 90s.

J: And this was like a way to maintain that craziness of this is a Satan thing. But these are like real Satan people.

S: So there's a big push to – the case is open. But there's a big push to try to close this case using modern DNA techniques. They actually have DNA evidence that they've never typed. They have additional DNA evidence. And we could use modern techniques in order to get more – basically more samples of DNA typed. And we can do something that's called DNA genealogy. And they have captured criminals in this way. So, yeah, whoever did this is not in the database.

C: Which is so surprising to me that if somebody committed a child rape that they never did it again. Or they –

S: They probably went out of country.

C: Could be. Yeah, yeah.

S: There was one car. There was one suspect who – man, this guy. I mean, clinically, just based upon his story and everything, they caught him in Taiwan, in Bangkok. And he had a really good story to tell about how he killed her. And he apparently knew details of the case that were not generally known. But he was cleared by the DNA. So – but what –

B: What the hell does that mean?

S: The car case shows that. I think he just fantasized about being the person who killed her. Either that or the DNA was contamination, right? But the – if he was really excluded by the DNA. And then they basically let him go. He just left the country to go rape more kids. I mean, this guy was found at a girls' elementary school, like, creeping on girls when they picked him up. This guy is a pedophile, right? This guy Carr. And he was – like, one of the investigators was talking to him and emailing to him for years before they picked him up. So – and he had a – you know, he told a very convincing story laying out everything that happened. He was just going to kidnap her. That's why he left the kidnapping note. And then he – she didn't intend for her to die, but he got too enthusiastic about the strangulation and didn't realize it. And then he did hit her in the head to make sure that she was dead. But and he sounded very convincing. But what that shows is even if he's not the person who did it, it's like you can make a story out of all those weird details of the case. Like, the intruder hypothesis is perfectly plausible because some weird creepo like this could have absolutely done that. This guy may have just been fantasizing about it.

C: So you started to mention that they can use DNA genealogy.

S: Yeah. So DNA genealogy is essentially you find people related to the killer. And you just – you build a genealogy and then you eventually lead your way back to close to the killer. And then you go interrogate them.

G: That's how they got the Golden State killer.

S: People who are – yeah. They caught killers doing this.

C: Yeah. I interviewed the woman who – the researcher. Yeah. On my podcast too.

B: So it is – how old is that technique?

C: I don't think it's that – I mean, a few decades. I mean, she's older now.

S: So it's possible in a few years. We may-

C: I think there are like ethical questions about using it. You know, because without other people's consent and stuff.

B: Oh, I see.

G: They use the genealogy databases from like-

C: 23&me and stuff. Yeah. So it's really nebulous.

G: Any other nice Christmas stories, Steve, you got?

C: Steve, what the fuck?

S: So we're reemerging – immersing myself in this case. I'm like, damn, this was like – there were so many skeptical red flags here. So much special pleading, the investigators. Essentially, they violated like rule number one of investigation is you don't get married to your pet hypothesis and then start to marshal all of the evidence and reasoning and motivated reasoning and confirmation bias all in that one direction. It's like Sherlock Holmes said, right? If you hypothesize before you have facts, you end up twisting the facts to meet the hypothesis rather than the hypothesis to meet the facts. And that's 100% what they were doing in this case. And it's not the only big public case. For those of you who are interested watch the recent documentaries on the Menendez brothers. That's another one that the media completely blew and created a completely false narrative and they were treated harshly. We even talked about – this is not a murder case, but we talked about Yoko Ono, right? And the world owes her an apology for completely creating this false narrative.

E: Oh, that she broke up the Beatles?

C: It's always the woman's fault.

G: Foreigner woman especially?

C: Yeah. These stories also highlight, I think, one of the things that as skeptics, we probably should cover more. We cover it on the show sometimes, but it's just the rank pseudoscience in forensic investigation. And how often things that we thought really held water just don't stand up to good scrutiny. So we've got to be really careful about forensic investigation.

G: Television ruining expectations too, like all those CSI shows ruining the expectations of what people think.

C: Enhance.

G: Yeah, right. Enhance.

E: Zoom in.

Primordial Black Holes (39:04)

• Finding Small Primordial Black Holes - NeuroLogica Blog 

S: I want to talk about primordial black holes, Bob.

B: All right. Go ahead.

J: You've got three minutes, Bob. Go ahead. Quick.

S: I can talk about it if you want me to.

B: No. I don't need you, Steve.

S: Go ahead, Bob.

B: All right.

G: 60 seconds, Bob, go.

B: Primordial black holes in the news. Scientists have been coming up with a wacky idea. It seems a little wacky when I read about it, to find primordial black holes by looking for hollow planets and microscopic tunnels in asteroids and planets and things. This is in a journal, Physics of the Dark Universe. The title is Searching for Small Primordial Black Holes in Planets, Asteroids, and Here on Earth. All right. So what are primordial black holes? These are black holes. They're like any other black hole that we've talked about on the show, except the origin is different. Conventional black holes are created by gravitational collapse of stars. Stars are exploding and collapsing, creating black holes, and they're merging, making even bigger black holes. But primordial ones are created before stars even existed. They existed, some people think, perhaps. Now, these are hypothetical. Remember, these are purely hypothetical. There's no real evidence that they exist. But they believe they could have been formed in the few seconds after the Big Bang, which seemed a little early to me, Steve, right? I didn't think.

S: Why?

B: I don't know. It just seemed like it would wait for things to settle down.

S: A lot of stuff happened in those first few seconds.

B: Oh, I know. They track it by, like, milliseconds. Milliseconds, and you have these major things happening. But essentially, intense energy densities in the early universe can create enough energy in one spot, right? Because you don't just need mass. Energy can create something like a black hole if you have enough energy in one spot. And so they think that's what happened. During that time, it created innumerable primordial black holes, some big, some small, right? Some that probably have already evaporated, right? Because it's been like 13 and a half billion years. So if it was small enough, it could have potentially already evaporated. But other ones could still be around. Now, the primordial black holes that we're concerned about here are on the small side, not big ones. So we're talking about something like with the mass of a small planet or an asteroid. But if you have that mass and you squeeze it down into a black hole, we're talking tiny black holes, like the size of an atom, the event horizon. You couldn't even see it.

J: Wait, they could be that small?

B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

J: I had no idea that that could happen.

B: If you collapse the Earth into a black hole, it would be about as big as a marble. But if you do less than that, it's going to be so small that you couldn't even see it.

J: Yeah, but subatomic?

B: Not subatomic. I mean, the size of an atom, atomic size. I mean, sure. Or even smaller. Jay, remember, the smaller you go, the less mass there is. They wouldn't last very long. They would just evaporate in a puff of Hawking radiation.

J: Yeah, but I mean, the reason why I'm not understanding it is like if it was the size of an atom, how many atoms could be in that space at the same time?

B: Jay, infinite density, man. I mean, I'm talking, you know. I mean, not really infinite. Our math breaks down. We don't know what the hell is going on in there.

J: Okay. At least you gave an honest answer.

B: Yeah. Now, the thing is that these primordial black holes could have tremendous utility. I thought that, oh, they couldn't find them. They've looked really hard. They haven't been able to find them. Oh, well. But they can have so much potential utility. The most important one in my mind is it could be dark matter, potentially. Sometimes I just think that these black holes could account for the dark matter that makes up the majority of the mass in the universe. We have no idea what this stuff is. That would be amazing. But what?

J: Go on.

B: Stop touching my knee. But these primordial black holes could also be responsible for primordial gravitational waves, the magnetic monopole problems, those problems. But they could also be the seeds for supermassive black holes. Because some black holes are so big. We're like, how did it get that big? The universe is not old enough to have a supermassive black hole that big.

J: How big is the black hole? So big.

B: So big. So it could be responsible for the creation of supermassive black holes that got their start the early universe before stars even existed. And even intermediate mass black holes could have a seed of a primordial black hole in its origin.

C: So gravitational waves, which the ones that we've measured, come from these supermassive black holes, right?

S: No. Not supermassive.

B: Not supermassive.

S: Just big ones.

C: Just big ones.

B: But they're surprising, though, because they're intermediate mass. Like, where do these intermediate mass black holes? We could explain the big ones, kind of, and the small ones, kind of. But the mid-mass ones, like, how does that happen? So these might explain some of that.

J: I think it makes sense that some of today's black holes date back all the way to the original ones that were created. It makes sense.

B: Right. Right. But we just don't have any evidence. And that's the big problem, Jay.

S: So how can we find them?

B: We can't find them. Yeah. You're pushing me along, Steve. So all right. So the paper's premise, the premise of the paper, before they even get into the meat of it, is that some scientists believe that primordial black holes are inhabiting stars. They're in some main-sequence stars, neutron stars, dwarf stars.

J: You think they're potentially inside a star?

B: In the middle of a star. I remember, though, if you've got a small event horizon, that's not a lot of surface area. So you slowly will suck in stuff. It's not going to be like, phoom, everything going in.

J: That doesn't make any sense to me.

B: Jay, think about it. The surface area is so tiny.

S: How tiny is it?

B: Atomic size. That you can't suck in a lot of stuff because the surface area is not there.

C: They don't suck. They don't suck.

S: Metaphorically.

C: OK.

J: But it would be like, how slow are we talking about? Like, would it happen over a month?

B: No. I mean, I guess potentially millions of years. It wouldn't suck in an entire star.

J: I don't know.

B: That's what they're saying.

J: I don't know if I believe that.

C: The star wouldn't fall in time.

B: Oh, yeah. Well, then do you disagree with Stephen Hawking, Jay? Because Stephen Hawking believed that there might be…

J: Yeah, screw him. He still owes me money, Bob. All right? Until he pays that debt, he's skewed in my book.

B: So he believed that there might be a black hole in our sun. That would be pretty cool. So that's the premise. So what these authors did is they took that premise and they ran with it and said, well, maybe these primordial black holes could be in other things, not just a star, but potentially small planets or other things. Or they might even create these microscopic tunnels as they go flying through things.

J: If they're that slow, they could be in you right now, theoretically.

B: Ah, but we'll get there, Jay. We'll get there.

J: I was kidding.

B: So that's what their paper. They're extending it to things like planetoids and moons and asteroids where you can potentially see the impact that a primordial black hole had with these objects. So the two big things I mentioned is they could potentially hollow out a small planet. If it gets captured by the planet somehow or it somehow has the planet grow around it and slowly, it also needs liquid. It's got to have some sort of viscous liquid, not rocky material, but like our core is not really liquid. It's like it's very dense material, iron and stuff.

G: Magma.

B: Magma. So they think that it would slowly take in the interior, the liquid interior of this small rocky planet and you would have a hollow planet. The other thing that they talk about is microscopic tunnels being created in material like in asteroids or even in the Earth. If you look in some of the ancient rock on Earth, if you look closely, you maybe will find some of these microscopic tunnels. They said that 110 quadrillion ton primordial black hole would leave behind a tunnel 0.1 microns thick. So this would be super, super tiny, but potentially discoverable that would point to evidence.

C: Would it appreciably increase the gravity on that planet?

B: No. Not really because if it's got the mass of an asteroid, you know.

C: But isn't that the point that black holes...

S: So, all right. If I might. What Bob's talking about is imagine like our moon, it captures, gravitationally captures a tiny primordial black hole, which sinks to its center. It then sucks out all of anything that can move, even if it's very viscous. Leaving behind anything that can't move, like a solid rocky shell. Now, if we were observing that moon, it would look the same because it has the same mass. It's just we don't know that some of that mass has moved to a black hole.

C: Right.

S: But...

B: But it would be... Their big thing, their big thing is that this is something that would be detectable and it would be very cheap.

S: Wait, wait, wait.

B: Those are two very important considerations.

S: But you're missing the one piece.

B: I'm not missing anything. Go ahead.

S: If in some way that black hole gets knocked out of it...

B: Right.

S: Then you have a hollow moon.

C: Right.

S: Which will have the size of a moon, but be way less dense than it should be.

J: Now, could you live on the inside of that moon?

S: That's not the point.

C: Quick, I know this might sound like a squabble, but would the moon have... You used a specific term. Did you say attracted the black hole or...

S: Yeah, gravitationally basically...

B: It somehow gets captured, but I think...

C: Gravitationally captured is what you said. Would the moon have gravitationally captured the black hole or would the black hole have gravitationally captured the moon?

J: Who's ever bigger. It's whoever has more...

C: It's not who's bigger. It's who has a...

J: More mass.

S: Depends on the size of the primordial black hole.

C: Right.

B: I think it would depend. It would have to also be a relatively slow moving, slow moving capture for that to really happen.

C: Right.

B: Because that's part of it. Because if you have a very, very fast moving primordial black hole, that's what's going to leave those tunnels. And it's... They compared it to having a glass, a window, and if you throw a rock at it, it's going relatively slow. It's going to shatter everything. But if it's going fast enough, like a bullet, it's going to make a nice little hole. And that ties into what people have said. Well, could this be happening? Could I have a primordial black hole going through me or my cat, they said. And they said that this is... They said it wouldn't be fatal if that happened. So what does that mean? Because it could be devastating. But I think it would be such a tiny... It would be so fast and leave such a tiny hole that we would maybe not even know that it happened.

J: How long until pseudoscientists turn this into like, you've got black holes in your butt. They try to sell some product.

B: You just say, well, what's the evidence? Is there a microscopic black hole?

J: No, we're talking about stupid people that buy stupid products. That's what I'm talking about.

G: Could you theoretically use this as a tool, though? Is there something preventing technology from either creating... Is there some physical rules that we would break where you wanted to use a primordial black hole for construction, let's say?

B: If you look at some potential advanced technologies, the main application for tiny black holes is for a rocket engine.

G: Okay.

B: Because you could actually... If you can somehow... Now, we're talking very, very small. It could be amazing power sources. But obviously, the technical problems are huge.

G: But there's no rules of physics we have to break, right?

B: No, right now, yeah. A black hole rocket engine is possible.

G: That's pretty cool.

B: It's fascinating. And it may be something that we will...

G: But even for like planetary mining or something.

B: Thousand years, huh?

G: Planetary mining, like if you wanted to create like habitable... Habitable?

C: Habitable.

S: Habitable.

G: Habitable. Let's say intercourse of planets where you would get this construction company that uses little black holes to empty out...

S: Black hole construction.

C: First, they're going to make them.

S: There's no rules of physics that say you can't do that.

C: Okay. This is a theory, though, right? It's all theoretical.

S: It's all theoretical.

C: So we live on a planet. And is there any reason to believe that there are any tunnels that are unaccounted for here?

B: Well, that's just it. They recommend that it would be inexpensive to actually look. And we could definitively or fairly definitively say, hey, this looks like a primordial black hole, went through the earth, left this tunnel that we can detect. Or we detected multiple hollow planets that make no sense except in the light of a primordial black hole interacting with it.

C: And not just the physical shape of the tunnel, but is there a way to measure the gravitational effect on the alignment of atoms or something as it tunneled through?

B: I think it's so fast, you maybe would have a straight tunnel. I'm not sure.

S: The feature that they're looking for is that it's a very long, completely perfectly straight hole, right? Because it would have to be something that's going in a straight line that would not be bothered by anything that would not be deflected by the granite or whatever it's going through. So it leaves a super long but super thin track.

B: The gravitational aftereffects would not really be anything that they think would be detectable except for the hollow earth scenario. But the hole, no.

C: But wouldn't that just over billions of years close in?

S: It would have to be the material, a hard material that could hold it.

B: So say like big plates of metal. But even that, if this metal plate was created 100 years ago or 50 years ago, chances are it hadn't interacted with a black hole. But if it was like a planet or an asteroid that's been around, even the earth has been around for billions of years.

S: Or even a rock. That's a four billion year old rock.

C: I don't know. This just seems like it's going to stay theoretical to me.

S: I agree. This is just what I'm saying.

B: They say this one, like they have actually said it could be a one in a million shot of actually finding this. But if it did, if we have proof, it could potentially solve all those other problems. Dark matter, I mean, that's a huge, huge mystery in physics. Huge.

S: This is all very speculative. They're just basically saying, all right, is there any possible way we could practically look for evidence that these primordial black holes actually exist? And these are the two things that they came up with. And they're technically true. But the idea that this unlikely scenario, it has to be captured by a planet that's big enough that it won't collapse in on itself, that has a liquid core, and then it gets ejected from it so we could find just the right size planetoid that's hollow that used to have a primordial black hole in it. It's like, okay, that's possible. The chances of us finding something like that is pretty, pretty low. Same thing, finding a microscopic little hole through an ancient material.

B: A tenth of a micron.

S: Even if it's 4 billion years old, there was still like a .00001 chance that they were going to find it. They're just counting on the fact that it's technically cheap to do this, so you could do a lot of it. But I doubt this is ever going to bear fruit.

B: True.

S: But it's an interesting thought experiment.

B: But the other angle to this is that, because I had written off primordial black holes because they just, they looked and looked and could not find them.

J: Bob wrote them off.

B: I wrote them off. I'm done with them. But the recent findings from Gravitational Wave Astronomy, LIGO, and James Webb Space Telescope, they are making discoveries now that are kind of pointing towards these primordial black holes. So that makes it even more interesting, fascinating, with a potential payoff. Because they're actually saying, well, maybe they do exist based on what they're observing.

S: So it could be updated.

Oldest Alphabet (53:42)

• Oldest known alphabet unearthed in ancient Syrian city 

S: George. Tell us about the oldest writing.

G: So this is two stories that I found sort of together. And this is one of these wonderful things that reveals archaeologically. The oldest thing we know is the oldest thing we know until we find something older. And it's kind of cool how there isn't this dogma that's involved with archaeology. Like, no, this is the oldest thing. Anything older, we're going to explain away. No. We change as new evidence comes along.

E: As long as it lines up with the Bible, we're good.

G: As long as it lines up with the Bible. Exactly. Exactly. Well, in Syria, they found these in a city called Umm al-Mara. At a dig at the ancient city of Umm al-Mara in Syria, they found these little tiny clay, like finger-shaped little tubes that has what now is being assumed to be the earliest alphabet. And it's 500 years older than what was considered to be the oldest alphabet coming up to it, which is really, really cool. They had this site. Archaeologists uncovered this tomb. It goes back to the early Bronze Age. And in this site, they had six skeletons, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and intact pottery vessels.

S: What was the spearhead made out of?

G: What was the what?

S: What was the spearhead made out of?

G: I don't know.

S: How old are we talking?

G: This is 2400 BCE. Next to the pottery, the researchers found four lightly baked clay cylinders with what seemed to be alphabetic writing on them. And so they're not sure what the language is. But previously, the oldest alphabet was thought to be in Egypt around 1900 BCE. So this is like 500 years, five centuries older.

S: In a different part, in a different country.

G: In a different country, a different sort of system of writing. And it's pretty fascinating and exciting because it extends this idea of what language is to the human animal. Now, concurrent with that was another story that I found that says culture, language is a very ancient human thing. And they just dated some stencils in a cave. Yeah, in Spain. So basically cave art. And this cave art is older than they thought. The oldest cave art is this. This cave art is, it was thought to be the oldest cave art was 40,000 years old. This now is 66,000 years old.

S: That's a big jump.

G: That's a big jump. 20,000 years older.

S: Do they know what hominid was there? Was it Neanderthal or Hermannian?

G: They're saying Neanderthal, yes. Neanderthal. And it's the first example of Neanderthal doing cave art. And it's stencils. So they're projecting some kind of, either their hand or some kind of design onto the wall. And they're covering it in a pigment. Now, the pigment that they use is mineral-based. Yeah, it's a mineral-based pigment. So you can't carbon date that. So what they do, what they figured out is because there are striations and growth on top of it, mineral deposits that happen on top of these drawings, they can take the stuff on top of it, you age that. And because it's on top of the ink or the whatever they used to draw, it's going to be older than what's on top of it. So the stuff on top of it they see is about 66,700 years old. It's got to at least be that old if not even older. And it's just so cool that, like, we have this modern bias of, like cavemen were cavemen, you know. And here they are with art and other stuff. These results suggest that the tradition of making hand stencils in Europe began long before they appeared in any other part of the world. The oldest known hand stencil art previous to this was in the Liang Thimpuseng Cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. That was about 40,000. Now this one in Spain is 66,000. Isn't that amazing?

S: It's amazing.

G: It's just so cool. And I love that process of, like, how can we date this stuff? Oh, yeah. We'll get the stuff that's on top of it. And what's nice is when they scrape the stuff on top of the art, they don't have to ruin the art at all. They don't affect it whatsoever.

J: Did you see the art?

G: I did not see any images of it.

J: I would love to see that.

G: They're very simple. They're very simple. And from what they were saying, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell right away that that is a stencil. But once they research and find out, that's what it is. I just love that, like, artists were 66,000 years ago there's one guy in the village who's, oh, that's Fred. He does his cave paintings. He's cool.

J: He's quirky. He's quirky.

G: He's a little quirky. He's a little focused, you know.

B: It's Fred the Neanderthal. I mean, this is the first.

G: Yeah. The first examples of Neanderthal doing cave paintings.

B: That's huge.

G: So the whole image of Neanderthals being these brutes is, like, completely wrong. They're just…

S: You know the history of that, George?

G: Yeah. I'm sure what racism was involved in…

S: Well, it's…

G: Or…

S: It was just scientific malpractice. I mean, I do agree that it was just general idea that, well, older humans had to be primitive. But the very first Neanderthal skeleton…

B: It had arthritis.

S: Crippling arthritis, probably rickets or something.

G: Oh, that's right.

S: So it was hunched over a little skeleton. They said, well, they were these hunchback little cavemen that were dragging their knuckles along the ground.

E: The problem with one sample.

S: It was probably a sampling bias, you know. That happened to be the first one that they found. Neanderthals were…

B: Robust.

S: They were… They were physically bigger and stronger than we were. Probably because they were adapted to the Ice Age. That was a cold adaptation. But cognitively, it's still an open question, like, how close they were to modern humans. They were very close, but were they just, like, the same but different? Or did Homo sapiens really have a cognitive advantage over Neanderthals?

J: Well, how big were their brains?

E: Yeah, brain size.

S: They were bigger than ours, but they were… Everything was… You know, they were just robust.

E: Oh, just physically.

S: They actually had bigger brains than Homo sapiens. That's interesting.

J: Wow.

S: But that had to do probably more to do with just their overall robustness. And one of the key pieces of evidence to say, well-

B: Art.

S: -was art. Like, did Neanderthals have art as sophisticated and as early and whatever as Homo sapiens or not? And, like, there's a whole debate still going on about whether they buried their dead and how that data was interpreted, and that was kind of over-interpreted, and it's not really as ironclad as we thought it was. You know, they said, oh, we found flowers in the grave. It turns out, maybe not that that evidence is actually dubious.

B: Oh, wait. The Neanderthals?

S: Yeah. So there's a lot of open questions about that. You know, we definitely had a more sophisticated tool set eventually than they did. But that could be culture, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that we were inherently smarter than they were.

B: Maybe their tools didn't fossilize.

S: Oh, no. Well, that's… It's hard to make that argument, and especially we're basically in the Stone Age. But our stone tools were better than their stone tools, right? Just like with Nazis. Our Nazis are better than their Nazis. Our stone tools… Remember that from The Right Stuff? Anyway, our stone tools are better than their stone tools. And you start to see, like, really finely crafted tools and tools that were probably partly for artistic purposes and not purely utilitarian, like decorative kind of thing. All in Homo sapiens. But, again, how much of that is culture? And even if, like, we had more of an artistic kind of bent than Neanderthals, that doesn't necessarily mean that we were smarter than them in every way. It's just we just don't know. You know, they're so close, it's hard to tell. But something like this, like pushing back Neanderthal art 20,000 years, whatever, that's going to be a huge piece to this puzzle.

G: Yeah, over the years, I've learned to lean into, like, appreciating and thinking that primitive, quote, unquote, cultures or people are way more, way more interesting and way more… And they have the same exact concerns and fears that we all do.

J: I'm sure.

G: Like, day-to-day living is not that different from, like, from our day-to-day concern about family, concern about whatever politics are they at that time, you know.

S: Well, even calling them primitive now is not accepted.

G: Right.

S: Because it's like it's a judgmental…

G: Completely.

S: You're assuming something that may not be true. They're pre-technological. That's not the same thing as primitive.

C: Is there an assumption that technology for, like, hunting and gathering came before technology for aesthetics?

S: Yes.

C: Why is the… I mean, I'm saying, is that a base assumption or is that what the evidence plays out?

S: Well, there are stone spear points that are millions of years old, way before any evidence of any artistic expression.

C: But is that because of the…

B: Millions?

S: Yeah.

E: Australopithecus was using?

S: Our Homo habilis ancestors had weapons. Homo erectus, they hunted… Homo erectus goes back to, what, 2.5 million years? They conquered the world because they were killing and hunting and cooking their food.

C: But is that because the things that would have been aesthetic maybe didn't keep?

S: Well, that's a huge debate.

C: Yeah.

S: Is how much can we invoke this idea that, well, maybe they had wooden tools that didn't fossilize. The problem with that is that there's no evidence for it. Either find a way to find evidence for that or you can't hypothesize things for which there can't possibly be evidence. We can't rule it out.

C: Well, you can hypothesize it.

S: I mean, it's just not useful to speculate about things that we can't have evidence for.

C: But it's also not useful to say, by definition, they hunted before they made beauty.

S: Of course not.

C: Because we don't know that.

S: We don't know.

C: Yeah, okay.

S: Yeah, exactly. All right.

C: But they didn't happen simultaneously.

Live Q&A (1:03:01)

The Rogues answer several live questions.

S: I think we're going to take a little break from the news items to do a Q&A. And, George, you've been collecting fascinating, unique, and insightful questions from our audience.

G: We've got some fun ones. We've got some good ones here. I'm going to try to go through a couple of these that are quick answers to start with. So we can just burn through those. And there's a couple that are maybe a little bit more in-depth. This was easy. This is for Jay. Do you play the guitar right-handed or left-handed?

J: I play the bass and the guitar left-handed.

G: Left-handed.

J: Yes.

G: Correct.

J: I am.

G: Five points. This is for Bob. If you could observe any object with the Webb Space Telescope, and this is from someone who works on Webb, what would you look at?

E: Ooh, Bob. Don't mess this up.

B: No. Why? Wait. Why?

G: This is for anybody.

J: How about a primordial black hole?

B: I don't know.

G: There you go.

B: But I don't know. I guess, yeah. Primordial. No. It's not like you can see it. I mean, I would say a neutron star. But I don't think – I'm not sure James Webb – it would have to be probably an exoplanet.

S: Yeah.

B: An exoplanet.

S: An exoplanet that might have an atmosphere.

B: Yeah.

C: So is it about finding something new, or is it about seeing something cool? Because remember, we're talking about the James Webb, so it's pretty. What would you pick because it's pretty?

B: Probably cool because finding something new, I'm not going to – I doubt I could find something new.

C: So what do you want to see that's pretty?

B: An exoplanet? Like an exoplanet atmosphere.

S: How about technosignatures?

B: Oh. Yeah. Technosignatures.

S: If we had a candidate, yeah.

B: That would be fantastic.

G: Okay. We'll make a list, and we'll make that happen. Okay. Now, let's do this quick if we can. So I'm going to go down the line here, and it's going to be a little bit challenging, but this is actually a really good question. So we're going to start at the far end. Start with Evan. So pick a favorite historical figure and show them something from today.

E: What do you mean, show them something?

G: Like, you can show an invention to Da Vinci, or like, pick a historical figure and like, what would you show that person? Yes. Pick a favorite historical figure. What would you most like to show them from the present?

J: Is it anybody that's dead?

C: I don't know how we're going to do this fast.

S: If they're not dead, you could just show them.

J: No, but I mean – What if they died, like, five years ago?

S: Whatever.

C: But is that really – I mean, yeah. Technically, it's historical.

J: Jesus Christ.

G: I think you could reframe it as – yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

E: Well, okay. Mark Twain invented, right, a – wow, what the heck was it? Like, a special musical instrument.

B: Nice.

E: And I think there's one on display at his – if you get to West Hartford, Connecticut, the Mark Twain house there, there's a museum next to the house, and among the things in there is this, like, one machine that was made. It's attributed to him, like so many other things, but it's this incredible device. I'd have to look it up, and that's kind of just what sprung into my head, but if you want to move on, I'll try to find it in the meantime and let you know what it is.

C: Can you describe it?

G: To show him that it's, like, in the museum?

E: Yeah. Hang on. I will look it up if you want to move on, and I'll come back to it.

C: Okay. I'll go. I would show, like, a Ray Bradbury or a George Orwell the things that they said were going to happen happening.

G: Wow.

C: Like, the VELT, I would, like, show, I don't know, like, a VR kind of situation, or, yeah, I would show the Big Brother surveillance that's, like, actually happening, and then I'd probably also show them the things that they didn't think of, like, the cell phone, like, the iPhone.

G: Okay.

C: Yeah.

G: Cool. Steve?

S: Yeah, I would, how about I would get Ada Lovelace and show her a modern computer? I'd show her my cell phone.

B: Oh, that would be cool.

E: Oh, I see what you're doing.

G: That would be a very good answer.

C: Yeah.

G: Jay, what do you got?

J: I mean, I think I'd want Michelangelo to see that David is still unbelievably revered, and I'd like to tell him, like, it's probably the best piece of art that's ever been created.

G: Excellent answer.

B: Yeah, I saw it just a couple months ago, it's amazing, but I would show Michelangelo a 3D printer.

G: That's great.

C: He'd be like, I can do that, too.

G: Yeah. Yeah.

J: I was like, I'm cranking out one of those things every hour.

G: As a Doctor Who fan, I would love to have that scene happen where van Gogh sees the Doctor Who takes him to the museum and he asks the art expert, explain how important van Gogh was, and he explains it to van Gogh.

B: Yeah. We've got to watch that again.

G: It's so good. I would do that. I would do it to let this this tormented guy, like, oh, man, you're amazing. Very good question. That's a fun one.

J: That's cool.

G: Someone said, Jay, will you sign my forehead?

J: I mean, yeah.

G: Okay. Good.

J: Okay.

B: In what, though? Blood?

G: This was asked a couple times in a couple different ways, and I want to ask it. It's about, it's basically, how can you make your memory better? Are there practices? So, yeah, one says-

E: Write things down. Does that count?

G: There's so many things to learn. How do you fit so much knowledge in your brain, and is it at all possible to increase one long-term memory capacity? Like three people asked a very similar question.

S: Yeah. I have a good answer to that question.

C: And I have probably a very different answer.

G: You might not remember writing that question, but you wrote that question down, so yeah.

S: Yeah. So, very quickly, this-

B: Mnemonics is one way. Mnemonics is a technique.

S: Well, you could use mnemonics. That's kind of basically using techniques to remember specific things that you have to remember. But if you just want to improve your overall memory, actually, the number one thing you could do is exercise.

J: Use it.

S: Is physically exercise. Your brain health, your brain function is the biggest determining factor is your overall brain function.

G: Wow.

S: Good sleep is close second. Especially with memory. People who don't sleep, well, they always complain about their memory. It actually causes what we call pseudo-dementia. You have really bad sleep. I mean, they think they're demented. They're not. But they just say, I can't remember anything. I say, well, you're not sleeping. That's why. But in terms of this learning, a studying technique, I think I heard that in those questions as well. What the evidence shows is that repetition is key, but you want to do repetition at increasing intervals.

C: Yeah.

S: So, you study it, then you look at it again in a few hours, then you look at it again in a day, then two days after that, then a week after that. You keep coming back to the material at prolonged intervals, and then that really locks it in.

J: I wish I remembered to do that.

C: And I'm going to read the question probably differently than the—but you said there were multiple people who asked about memory. So I think that there's this sort of—how we're taking it, which is like, how do I increase my cognitive capacity? Like, how do I do memory better? And then a different take on it, which is colored by my experiences with my work, is how do I remember the things that matter to me in a more vivid way? And I think that the best practice for that is literally practicing, like, mindfulness throughout the day. It's being present when things are happening. It's trying to avoid allowing yourself to be distracted and really noticing what's coming in through all your senses, what your body experiences like, because memory is a multi-streamed function. So if you can tie it to both your visual memory, but also your emotional memory, your sense memory, like your smell, your taste, your touch, those memories are going to be more vivid for you as you pull them back later.

G: Excellent.

B: Another idea is to—is the way you organize information. Like for example, if I come across a really interesting scientific tidbit, a really great explanation of some scientific fact that's kind of difficult, I take a screenshot and I put it in a special folder. I've got a folder filled with that, so I can go back and refresh my memory of these things that I found such an aha moment that I want to save them and have access to them. But I struggle with that, saving and organizing information so that I can quickly get to it. Like the classic example, I got 30,000 pictures on my phone and Evan was just doing it. Wait, I want to show you a picture. 20 minutes later, I can't find that damn picture. And if AI doesn't help me solve that, I'm going to be really pissed.

J: They will. That's going to happen.

E: Still waiting. Still waiting.

C: But I also think that stopping and taking a picture of a thing actually takes you out of the experience, so it may backfire for you.

E: It depends on the experience.

B: But still though, sometimes there's nothing like having that picture.

C: Sure, but if you want to remember a concert, don't videotape it the whole time.

E: Right. That's true. Or the eclipse. If you're going to go watch the solar eclipse.

C: Don't try and get that.

E: Don't worry about the pictures.

S: Something you should just experience. Absolutely.

G: Did I ever talk about my SMemory idea?

C: SMemory?

G: SMemory.

C: Love it. I already love it.

G: Did we talk about it?

S: You talked about it with me. I don't know if you did it on your own.

G: The idea that sometimes you open up a closet in your parents' house and it's like, oh, ski trip. Because it just instantly hits you with that smell or whatever that is, or the Christmas ornaments or whatever. And you're just like, oh my God. And the memory comes flooding into your brain. I want to have a product that are all these different odors, and it's called a can of SMemory. And you go to a concert or you go to the eclipse and you pop open a can and you associate that with the event that's happening. And then in the future, way down the road, you buy another can of SMemory 1B and you pop it open. And would it trigger the same memory of the thing? I don't know if it would work, but I think it's a potential product that we could all have.

J: I think it would work, because we know that those two, the sense of smell and memory are kind of connected in an interesting way.

S: But how many times does that have to happen before it really gets entrained?

B: That's the question.

C: Yeah, is it a flashbulb memory?

G: Or how pungent does it have to, how nasty does it have to sort of be to SMemory?

C: Or like, yeah, it's your grandma's house that you've been to like 500 times versus one concert one time.

G: There's two more if we have time. I think these are really fun. Have two of you ever been in an argument and not been talking to each other and had to record a show?

S: Had to record a show? No.

C: Well, we had a show where Bob left.

E: Yeah, Bob rage quit.

C: He rage quit in the middle of an episode.

B: I did it for an effect.

J: No, that was my fault.

E: Was that in the middle of the episode or at the beginning of the episode?

J: Bob was pissed at me.

E: You'll love it.

J: Basically, we were arguing about something, and I hate to bring it up again, but I called Bob Trump.

C: Yeah, he was like, all right, Trump.

J: And he said, F you, and he just turned off his mic.

C: And this was the last time.

J: Because I was definitely trying to say something to piss him off.

B: That's crossing a line.

J: But we don't...

C: Did he come back?

E: Still cracks me up.

S: Yeah, yeah. He came right back.

J: Bob, Steve, and I don't...

C: I don't know if it was right back.

J: As brothers, we don't...

C: There was some negotiation, I think.

J: We just don't. It just goes away immediately.

E: Bob had to go walk it off.

J: We can get... Steve and I can get into a super heated, semi-pissed off discussion about something.

G: Oh, no, we know.

C: We know. We all know.

B: Been there.

J: The love I have for Steve and Bob outweighs, amazingly outweighs any anger that could possibly come up.

C: And it hasn't happened much, I feel like, lately. There was definitely a time when we were in the studio that was not comfortable for us. I don't remember. It was a while back.

E: But Cara and I are testing each other. Cara, this is weird.

C: Always.

E: You're tapping me.

C: Brothers. Am I right?

News Items

Goop Spiral (1:13:48)

• Is Gwyneth Paltrow’s business empire nearing its end? Goop ends 2024 with lawsuits and layoffs 

S: All right. Now, Evan.

E: Yeah.

S: How is Goop doing?

E: If you've read any headlines recently, you may have come across one that reads, well, what I read the other day. Is Goop nearing its end? And I was like, yay!

S: Schadenfreude.

E: I had to read that. What is Goop? In case anyone in our audience does not know, they are a wellness and lifestyle brand company. This is their official thing. Founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, American actress. Launched in September 2008 as a weekly email newsletter providing new age advice, such as police your thoughts and eliminate white foods. And the slogan, nourish the inner aspect. OK. Fine. They expanded into an e-commerce, collaborating with fashion brands, launching pop-up shops, wellness summits, print magazine, podcast, docu-series for Netflix, which maybe some of us... Cara, I know you watched that one, didn't you? Did you watch it?

C: Which one?

E: The Goop Netflix docu-series?

C: No, I don't think I did.

E: About Goop? You didn't? Oh, OK.

C: Should I?

E: I thought you had.

C: Is it a Goop series, or is it a series taking down Goop?

E: It's a combination.

C: Oh, OK.

E: So it's kind of a hybrid. It's a hybrid. Right, Jay?

J: It's a hybrid.

E: I call Gwyneth, I've called her in the past the Queen of Quackery, the Duchess of Dubiousness, and the Matriarch of Malarkey. And I think that holds true. Among the things, in case you don't know, that Goop promotes, sells their products, the people that they endorse, well, we'll go through a couple of them just so you can kind of get some background, then we'll get into the actual news for the week. They have perfumes and candles that will treat anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD. They have an author who writes for them who is a chiropractor who does energy exorcisms in people. Yeah, so chiropractor and exorcism, two of my least favorite things. They have articles about underwire bras causing what?

C: Cancer.

E: Yeah, which is very—

C: It's not a thing you get.

E: It's actually a pre-Goop idea, but they kind of just use their celebrity to elevate that idea.

S: My favorite is the Jade Vagina Egg.

E: Oh, yeah, I'm getting to that. I'm coming up to that.

S: Yeah, I'm sure you didn't miss that one.

E: Biofrequency stickers, remember?

J: Yeah.

E: Using energetic frequency to address imbalances. That's not vague in any way. Earthing, how walking barefoot could cure your insomnia, and more. Oh, negative words can change the structure of water, according to the experts at Goop. A guru who, I don't know what his name is, but— Oh, Spirit. His name is Spirit using wisdom passed on to him from a divine voice, so he's basically a what? A channeler. They have a channeler, apparently, that they use as well, but they also make some specific— Instead of these kinds of things, they talk about vitamins, among other things, and they actually promote their own brands, and they'll sell you vitamins with things like— This particular one had biotin in it, but 8,300 times the daily recommended allowance of biotin, among other things. This is common among supplements. They have all kinds of elevated levels of this stuff. But now, yeah, of course, I think Steve brought up their most well-known, or some of the most press they've gotten were things having to do with vaginal eggs, which will, according to them, enhance your orgasm and improve bladder control. They say nothing about the risk of a bacterial infection increase, and also what the V-steam, the vaginal steam, also to balance your hormones, but they also don't tell you that it will also burn your skin down there, and also is a risk for bacterial infections. For these last two things, they suffered— They were taken to court by a bunch of district attorneys from around the country, and they had to settle a court case, $145,000 in fines that they had to pay in 2008.

J: The price of doing business.

E: Right, it's basically a rounding error for them. But there have also been some other cases in which they've run afoul with legal issues.

S: It's hard to do that. It's so permissive. Running afoul of a law for practicing pseudoscience? You have to be really bad.

C: Yeah, egregious.

E: Just this year, 2024, and this is why the article is saying, is this the end of goop? Earlier in the year, they had a new lawsuit brought against them by a company called Good Clean Love, which is a trademark brand, but goop went ahead and introduced something called Good Clean Goop. And so Good Clean Love, for whatever their flag in the sand is, they took them to court this year. For many months, that was pursued, and they only recently settled this case, although this particular news report I said said the case is still ongoing, but Bloomberg reported that the case just settled a couple of weeks ago, undisclosed amount. However, from the time that the lawsuit took place between now and then, they've had two rounds of layoffs at goop. At their peak, they had 216 employees at this company. They cut 18% of their workforce in August of this past year, and now just recently, a couple weeks ago, they laid off another 6% of their workforce on top of that. So they are cutting, cutting, cutting.

C: But don't you think it's just going to bounce right back with RFK in office, or not in office, doing whatever the fuck he's going to be doing?

E: I don't know. Let me read you a couple of paragraphs from the article, because I think this is kind of the crux of the thing. One of the company's challenges has been its excessive diversification. Until now, Goop has been a newsletter, podcast, and beauty line products. They also talk about the Netflix shows, their stores, Goop Kitchen, which is a takeout chain in Southern California, and they launched a wellness conference and luxury cruise. But these staff cuts that are occurring have been targeted to prioritize the emphasis maintaining what's left of Goop in three areas, beauty, fashion, and food. They are primarily abandoning initiatives based on wellness. That's not insignificant. I don't think it's going to be the end of Goop, in my opinion. These things rarely die out. However, for whatever the external pressures are, the market essentially is hopefully changing, and I hope it's driven by the consumer behavior, is that fewer people are buying into this crap. And as a result, they're taking a look, finally, kind of making some hard financial decisions over at Goop, and deciding, yeah, we've got to cut basically what's not working, what's not selling. And it's all the garbage stuff that we've been taking them to task for for many years.

C: I'm not hopeful about that. I think it just ebbs and flows. I think this is just a trend. They're going to go with the trends. But I don't know. I'm really not hopeful that sort of the wellness industry is doing pretty well. I don't think Goop is a metric for the entire industry. Do you?

J: Yeah. It could be bad management. You never know.

C: Yeah. And I think it's just going to get worse. I'm really nervous about this next administration.

J: I agree, Cara. We've got lined up ahead of us.

C: It's going to be rampant.

J: One idiot after the next. I mean, pseudoscience is going to be in the front seat.

C: Glorified, yeah, and celebrated in a way that I don't think in this country ever has been like sanctioned in that way. Maybe there was a historical era when snake oil was like government officials were promoting snake oil.

E: And again, it never fully goes away. The pseudoscience will always be there and there will be the next Goop or whatever it is that ultimately comes out. However, Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow do get a lot of publicity, probably more than other companies out there that are doing it because they don't have the celebrity name behind them or whatever reason. And to see this specifically, though, that they're going to do what they have to do, basically make a corporate decision here. And as a result of that, they'll phase out a lot of the crap that they've been doing.

S: Are they just being out-competed by other players?

E: Yeah, so certainly there are more players in the marketplace as well. And I'm sure that has an impact on things. But they're going to continue their beauty, fashion, and food items.

S: But it is a good thing that such an upfront brand is going to be moving away from that.

E: Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

S: But I agree with Cara. I'm not terribly optimistic.

Food Distribution (1:22:41)

• https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/08/food-supply-chain-networks-why-sustainable-practices-fail-and-approaches-to-improve-them/ 

S: All right, Jay, you're going to finish us off by talking about food distribution around the world.

J: Yeah, so I have a question for everyone. So just name some things you had for breakfast today.

G: Eggs.

C: Coffee.

E: Pizza.

J: Donuts? Somebody had donuts for breakfast? That's pretty awesome. So I find this fascinating. The global food trade industry is much bigger than I originally thought. And to give you an idea, I'll read a list of food items that people would have for breakfast in the U.S. and where they came from. So oatmeal from Ireland, a banana from Costa Rica, sugar from Brazil, coffee made from beans grown in Ethiopia, Colombia, Sumatra, and Honduras. And if you fed your dog, they likely had kibble that was made from seaweed that came from China and fish oil that came from Peru. Yeah, a lot of these items could come from the U.S. But the fact is a lot of them come from outside of the U.S. And from most countries, a lot of the food items come from outside that country as well. So about 25% of all food crosses international borders. 25%.

C: Of all food globally?

J: Pretty much globally. I mean, this article and my resources didn't dig into Pacific nations. In general.

C: But you're not saying in America 25% of our food comes from international sources?

J: Yes.

C: Oh. I thought you were saying around the world 25% of food comes from...

J: I think it's pretty universal that a quarter of the food supply is coming from somewhere else. And they're speculating that by 2050, half the world's population could depend on calories that are produced outside, right? So what is the scale of the global food trade? So first of all, it's a huge system. It's worth about $2 trillion that were measured in 2023, which quadrupled since the year 2000. So it's trending in that direction in a strong way to increase. Nine countries export 80% of the world's wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans. 134 countries rely on these nine exporters for more than half of their imports for these staple crops. China consumes 70% of the world's soybean exports. What's that for?

E: Soy sauce.

J: I thought soy sauce, right? It's for animal feed. I'm like, oh yeah, the soy sauce. No, it's animal feed. I thought that was pretty funny.

S: That's a lot. 70% of the world's soy was going to soy sauce? That would be... That would be something.

G: Because those bottles are so tiny. They're so small.

J: Go to Costco, man. I have like a gallon one. It's awesome. All right. So the U.S. exports about 25% of the food traded globally, which much of that's coming from California, Oregon, Washington, and Texas. So keep in mind, like when I say that, just remember that like most of that food is coming from those four states. What are the benefits of the global food trade? So there are some very strong standouts here, like Peru, for example. That's where most quinoa exports are. They make up 40% of the global market comes from Peru, right, just for quinoa. And what happened was when sales started to go up, right, because quinoa hasn't been around forever, the farmers in the Andes, they turned this traditional crop literally into a lifeline for them. And it services a lot of people now economically.

G: Is that traditionally Peruvian quinoa? Is that like where it's from?

J: From what I understand, like that's where it is from.

G: You could have held a gun to my head, I would have never been able to say where quinoa is from. It's amazing.

J: Yeah. So the global trade that's happening right now diversifies global diets. It brings foods like bananas and pineapples and red chilies to countries worldwide. Costa Rica produces half the world's pineapples. India accounts for 40% of the global dried red chili production.

S: It's an interesting question of like is this a good thing or a bad thing?

J: Well, let me get to that because I'll tell you.

S: All right.

J: I'll tell you. It's both at the same time.

G: Maybe it's both.

E: It's complicated.

J: Maybe it's both. So here are some benefits and costs here. So Brazil, they've cleared huge areas of the Amazon rainforest. Not good, right?

S: That's bad.

J: They make beef and soybean production. That scares me. And we've talked about this on the show many times. There's a lot of unfound medicines that could be pulled out of the Amazon forest, right? Costa Rica uses more pesticides per hectare than any other country to meet the global pineapple demand. Now, I know Evan probably doesn't care about that. He just wants his pineapples.

E: Yes. I never have thought about where my pineapples come from, but I love my favorite fruit, pineapple.

J: Yeah. Pineapples are magical. But the point is in order to meet the demand, like things have to change. The farmland has to either be optimized or they need more farmland. Spain's Mar de Plastico generates 30,000 tons of plastic waste annually. You know, that's horrifying. We have to think about these things. We have to think about the fact that we're going to as the population increases, it's not just increasing in a linear fashion. It's exponential. Like we have 8 billion people today, right? And that number is going to rise much faster now, the world population, because we have more people. And there are vulnerabilities also in the global food system. And this is kind of scary. I'll give you some real world examples here. So the disruptions can come from literally anything, right? So a war, a drought, COVID, and even that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal. That was bad.

S: Well, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

J: That's the first on my list.

S: Massively disrupted their wheat exports.

J: Yeah, the war disrupted 30 to 40% of global wheat exports. But you know, think Ukraine, they said it was the breadbasket of Europe, right? That is not an exaggeration that you have 30 or 40% of the global wheat exports that are coming from one country, and that country goes to frickin' war. I can't bake bread anymore, and I won't have that, you know? I mean, all joking aside, though, that's scary, because people depend on that. Like in the United States, I feel like, yeah, if wheat went away, we'd probably be okay. There's lots of other things.

S: It'd be inconvenient, but we wouldn't starve to death. But there are people around the world who will starve to death.

J: Absolutely.

S: If that kind of disruption happens.

J: So the global food production is highly concentrated in a few regions, obviously, because of how arid the land is and all that. Did I use that word correctly?

S: Arable.

J: Arable. I always screw those two up. Okay, arable, sorry. At least I remember to remember to do it. California produces 80% of the celery in the U.S. and is a major global supplier. So when a drought hits California celery can go down. And there is massive future challenges here, because global demand, like I said, is rising and the climate change is having a huge impact on the land that's being, that's producing right now. And it's going to shift, right? Literally, probably in our lifetime, we're going to see some major changes in where they're growing food. Because, like, this can't grow it here anymore, but hey, this is working over here now. And that's not going to be easy, because what if there's housing there? And we need that land to grow staple food. And the bottom line here is that we need to build some global infrastructure. I'm not so sure how much countries would work together on this. Being that it's a $2 trillion industry, there probably is a lot of people are motivated to do it. But they're saying things like, we have to build ports that can handle massive grain storage to keep if we could have, like like we have in the United States, we have a backup of gasoline, right, in case something happens. We need backups of food in case a pandemic happens or a war breaks out and that type of thing. Just interesting to think, though. I mean, I had no idea that when I'm eating oatmeal that a huge percent of it could just be coming from Ireland, you know.

S: But I think you didn't really talk a lot about the good aspects of it, but I also think a lot of the negative aspects are a little overblown in that they're sort of not really related to the fact that we're exporting food. It's just that we're producing a lot of food, like using a lot of pesticides or whatever. That's more of a farming issue, not really an exporting issue. If you do an analysis of efficiency in the system, right, which is very critical, we're at a point where, like, how efficient our big worldwide systems are makes a huge difference. Growing the food that is optimal for the land it's grown on is way more important than how far you have to ship it to the person who's going to eat it, right? The whole local thing is kind of pseudoscience. It doesn't really matter how far your food has to travel as long as the food was grown in the most efficient way. So for example, you're far better off buying potatoes from Idaho shipped to Connecticut than trying to grow potatoes in Connecticut because the soil is not ideal for it. The efficiency of that is way better. The good thing about this worldwide food web is there's a reason we're growing so much food in these locations because that's the best place to grow that food. It's adapted to it, the soil is the best for it, the system is the best for it, whatever. We're better off just doing that and shipping it around.

C: But aren't you then also better off eating seasonal food that does grow in your area?

S: Yeah, you could do that too. I mean, so you...

C: Like, do you have to have that one fruit from that one country that's like...

S: Yeah. So I do think that there's a balance here where you want to eat seasonally as good. We always shop at all the local farms when their stuff is growing. That's great too. But having a varied diet is hugely important for nutrition and especially globally. Again, we're privileged because we have an incredible diet. But in terms of availability of different kinds of foods, in other parts of the world it's not as much. But the availability of a varied diet is massively important to human health.

C: Yeah. But like at a certain point it's excessive, right?

S: Yeah. It's all about balance. It's all about balance.

J: Yeah. But there are people that like 90% of what they eat are plantains.

C: Yeah. Totally.

J: You could live off of potatoes, but that would not be a healthy thing to do, right?

S: Potatoes are kind of a staple food. And you know what I mean? So that is not just like a luxury food like a pineapple where it is something that people are living off of. And growing that in the most efficient way is important. So I don't think we should like try to discourage or downgrade the sort of global food market because we all want to like eat only food that's grown locally. I think that's kind of a myth. You're better off letting these systems evolve the way they should evolve, like growing it most efficiently. Also, if you talk about distribution, having centralized distribution is also more efficient than having like every farm distribute it themselves. So again, like the sort of local network, there's a reason why we have the systems that we have now because it is efficient. What we do need to do, in my opinion, is make sure that we are using each piece of land for its optimal use because that's the factor that seems to be the most important in terms of agricultural efficiency and that we continue to advance our technology like GMOs so that, we are optimizing the whole agricultural industry and that we'll do things like reduce pesticide use and increase yield, etc.

E: Do you all think that seasonality or the availability of certain items at only certain times of the year enhances the enjoyment of those items?

C: Absolutely.

E: Sure.

S: To some extent.

J: I don't know about that.

C: I think so.

G: I wonder. Because like, okay, you only have eggnog at Christmas. If you're going to have it, you only have it at Christmas. If you like it, you can get it year round. But like I would never have eggnog at the 4th of July.

J: But that's very different than eating a really nice apple, which is a healthy thing, you know.

G: Right, sure.

J: Eggnog's bad for you.

G: No, I'm sure. That was just a seasonal example that popped in my head. But like, yeah, not having some access to something increases the enjoyment of it when you have it.

C: Constantly having access to every available option is not good for you psychologically. It's not.

S: The system that we have now, like...

J: I don't know about that.

C: A hundred percent it's true.

S: We kind of have both because, like, there are still seasonal fruits and vegetables that we get. Like, there's this one two to three week period a year where you get the really good peaches. You know what I mean? Like, the rest of the year you get crappy peaches. They're still peaches. They're fine.

E: Corn is the same.

S: Right. Or like this, yeah, local sweet corn.

G: Jersey.

S: When that's ready it's just better. It's just better than the stuff that is shipped around.

E: Corn in August is the best.

S: So there's a certain time of year when the honey crisp apples are great, and you get the local stuff. The rest of the year you can get them, but they're, like, just okay. You know, they're not the stuff that is ripe off the tree. So you still get that limited window for...

G: The quality.

S: For really high quality, good produce.

G: I love it. I think it's so cool to, like, look forward to...

S: I agree. It's like it's peach season.

G: Yeah. Or it's pumpkin season. It's like for the pumpkin soup and whatever it is.

J: The only thing I look forward to, I love chestnuts. And literally there's, like, a three-week window where they're available and I celebrate.

G: So do you think you would enjoy them as much if you had them year-round?

J: I would enjoy them more because I'd eat them more. You understand what I'm saying?

G: Cara's saying no. Cara's saying no.

C: But there's a fundamental difference on this panel about, like, this very existential dialectic. Like, I believe that the only reason life matters the way it does is because we die and they don't think that. So it's a more philosophical argument about...

S: Not what I think.

C: I know.

S: I think it's time for science fiction.

G: This is getting good.

Science or Fiction (1:50:30)

Theme: Winter Item #1: Lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but is harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. Item #2: Although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level in the Sahara desert and the Atacama desert. Item #3: Aomori City in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but is harder to see and hear due to the dense snow.
Science	Although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level in the Sahara desert and the Atacama desert.
Science	Aomori City in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet.

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious. Then I will challenge my panel of skeptics and the live audience to tell me which one that you all think is the fake. Now, in honor of December 7th, which is Pearl Harbor Day, the theme for this Science or Fiction is winter.

E: It's not winter. It's not even winter.

C: When is winter?

E: 21st.

C: 21st.

S: This show will be coming out in winter.

J: Okay.

C: In honor of December 7th.

G: That's kind of like with the journal with the January 2025. Okay, I get it now.

S: We'll be going live in the end of December, so we will be winter.

E: Okay. Let's do it.

S: Okay, Evan?

E: Yeah, you pulled that out of the fire, Steve. Good job.

S: I know who's going first on this. All right. Item number one. Lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but it's harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. Item number two. Although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level in the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert. And three, Aomori City in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet.

G: That's a lot of snow.

S: Okay. Evan, why don't you go first?

E: Number one about lightning being just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. No doubt about it that I've witnessed many times lightning during snowstorms when you're in New England. I think we've all had that experience.

B: I haven't.

E: Is it as common, though? That's the question here. Is it only because it's harder to see and hear due to the dense snow? I've never really thought about that. If I knew more about lightning and its properties, perhaps I would be able to better determine if it has an impact during regardless of the precipitation or the temperature, or that temperature difference. The second one about the snow in the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert. I'm sorry, where's the Atacama Desert, Steve?

S: The Sahara Desert is in northern Africa.

E: I know where that is.

S: It's in the tropical zone above the equator. The Atacama Desert is in the southern hemisphere below the equator, about as far below the equator as the Sahara Desert is above the equator.

E: I have a feeling that one's science. The last one about Japan being the snowiest city in the world, 26 feet. I don't know that you really think of Japan as a place where you think snow, you think Siberia, you think Canada, you think maybe Norway. You don't really think of Japan as being that. This could be a city. It's not really a mountain peak. You have a city and a mountain peak? That would be kind of unusual. Boy, I've never heard. It's either this one or the first one. I will say the city in Japan is not the snowiest in the world. That one is fiction.

S: Okay, Cara.

C: No, I grew up in Texas and I live in L.A. I should go last. I have no idea. Snowstorms and lightning, I've been in like one snowstorm in my life. I have no idea.

J: Oh my god, Cara.

E: What?

C: What? I chose wisely.

E: What? One?

S: You should move to Aomori.

C: No. The Atacama Desert is the driest place in the world. It has the least precipitation of anywhere else in the world, measurably. That's interesting that it would also have snow, which is a form of precipitation. Although rare, though, he caveats all of these all the time. It has fallen in recent times near sea level. Does that mean it's stuck? Not necessarily. It could have fallen and then immediately evaporated. The city in Japan, it's a snowy city. I definitely feel like there's imagery in my mind of a lot of snow in Japan. I do think that it's quite mountainous. Obviously, anywhere. I live in L.A., but you can go to the mountains and that's where all the snow is. It's at elevation. If it's a city at elevation, maybe. I don't know. That one doesn't bother me as much, but that's the one you picked, right?

E: Yes.

C: Maybe it's a city somewhere on Mount Fuji or something. I don't know. I don't know. That one could be science. I don't know. Did snow fall in the Atacama? Did snow fall in the Sahara? It just has to have happened once and that would be science. Maybe it's the lightning one. That's the one I know the least about, so I'll say the lightning one is fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

J: I'm going to just get right to it. I think that the one about lightning in the snowstorm and it's supposed to be as much as rain versus snow, I think that one is fiction because largely anecdotal, but I'm getting up in years and I've experienced both snow and rain a lot in my life. I have never, ever seen or heard lightning during a snowstorm. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but statistically, when it's a thunderstorm and lightning is happening and all that, it is super prevalent. It's not like, oh, I kind of hear it. You could hear it from 20 miles away. You know what I mean? So that one has got to be fiction. There's just no way that lightning is landing a half a mile from me and I'm not hearing it.

S: Okay, Bob.

B: Yeah, it's hard to disagree. I was thinking the same thing as Cara, though, the snow in the desert. Yeah, you say it's fallen, but I don't think it landed. I could see it potentially. You have some upper atmospheric chill that can create the snow, but it's not getting on the ground or lasting for long. I kind of see that. City in Japan, yeah, I could see it's in a mountainous region. I would have thought I would have heard of it. It's the snowiest place. It's a lot of snow. But the lightning one, I totally agree. Not only have I never remember experiencing, hearing, or anything, I've never even seen pictures of lightning in a snowstorm. You'd think there'd be one picture out there that would be something that you'd recognize. So, yeah, I'll say that one. I think Steve's going to screw us on this one.

C: Yeah, I think so, too.

S: Okay, and George.

G: I would answer this, but I don't think this is either the time or the place.

E: How about now?

B: All right.

G: Okay, now. So I've heard lightning. I mean, from my recollection as a child, all the ski trips I used to take, I remember hearing lightning during a snowstorm and being like, wow, this is amazing. The question is just as common, which is such a Steve thing to throw in there.

C: You heard thunder.

G: I know for sure it has snowed in the Sahara.

C: Right?

G: What's that?

C: You heard thunder.

G: Oh, sorry, yeah, sorry. I mean, both. Like, yeah, no, I remember, like, yeah.

C: You saw the lightning.

G: Sorry, sorry.

C: Same thing, but different.

B: Somebody had to say it.

G: Sahara, there has been snow. I don't know the other, the Atacama. I don't know about that. And Japan, 26 feet of snow seems excessive. So I am going to say the Japanese snow one.

B: Nice.

S: All right, so you guys are split between one and three. We're going to poll the audience. If you think that the lightning and snowstorms is the fiction, clap. If you think that snow in the Sahara and Atacama is the fiction, clap. And if you think that the Amori City is the fiction, clap. Okay, so definitely skewed towards the first one. Very few of you think that the second one is fiction. So we'll start there. Although rare, snow has fallen in recent times near sea level. Near sea level. That's interesting. I threw that in there. In the Sahara Desert and the Atacama Desert, the entire panel thinks this one is science. Most of the audience thinks this one is science.

C: He's so happy.

G: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is Atacama, like, a pun? Like, it's not a real thing?

C: No, it's a real thing.

S: It's a real thing. Cara is correct. Atacama is the driest place on Earth. It is a desert.

G: I just heard that pun. I'm like, if that's a pun, I'm going to throw this microphone at your face.

S: Sahara, you may have heard, is also a desert. This one is science. This is science.

G: Okay. Whew.

S: And, yes, it's on the ground.Like, you can see pictures of snow on the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert.

J: I've seen it.

S: Yeah, it's amazing. And the Atacama recently had that's the more surprising one because it is not just arid. It's also not just hot. It's not just tropical. It's very dry. But they had an Arctic weather pattern that sent cold air up there and they had snow in the Atacama Desert, which is amazing.

J: And the lizards, they snowboard, you know?

S: Yeah, they did. The lizards, yeah. In Jay's mind, they snowboard. I tried to find if snow has ever fallen on the equator at sea level.

J: I would say, yeah, at some point.

S: No.

J: Never, huh?

S: Never.

G: Wow.

S: Not in recent times. It depends on different climates. But I couldn't find any actual reports. And every reference I found said, no, not at sea level. There's a snow line. You guys know what the snow line is, right? And that, of course, gets higher the closer you get to the equator. There are mountains on the equator like Kilimanjaro where there is snow. But you have to get really high up in the mountains on the equator. But this is the farthest equatorial places I could find where snow at sea level was documented in these two deserts. Okay. I guess we'll go back to number one. Lightning is just as common during snowstorms as rainstorms, but is harder to see and hear due to the dense snow. Cara, Jay, and Bob think this one is the fiction along with most of the audience thinks this one is the fiction. Now, there are a couple of details in here. So, George, you keyed in on one. So is it just as common as snowstorms? Does it happen at all, right? Have you guys ever heard of snow thunder?

E: Yes.

B: No.

E: I've heard it. I've heard it many times. I'm surprised you guys have never experienced this.

B: You made that up.

C: What is snow?

E: Nobody snows.

G: Cara, it's like cocaine.

C: I know of that.

S: So snow thunder happens. Now, it is also true that the presence of the snow dampens the sound.

J: How much?

S: So, like, Jay, you actually kind of – you said something very interesting. You said you could hear the lightning from 20 miles away.

J: Yeah.

S: But then why would you use that to conclude that you would hear it if it were a half a mile away? The point is the distance at which you can see and hear a lightning strike is way shorter during a snowstorm than during a rainstorm. You wouldn't see the one 20 miles away.

J: Right.

S: Right? That's your experience. Most of the lightning you're seeing is not half a mile away, right, during a rainstorm.

J: Yeah.

S: So that is also true. But it is nowhere near as common as rainstorms. This is the fiction.

J: That was a good one, Steve.

S: Yeah. This is the fiction because there has to be certain atmospheric conditions in order for it to happen during a snowstorm. It's not as conducive to generating electrical storms, lightning storms. But if you have – you have to have warmer air below colder clouds and there has to be something going on, like wind, that is forcing that warm air up into the clouds and then that can produce the lightning storm during a snowstorm. But I think the reason we've, like, grown up with snowstorms our whole life and we've never seen or heard the snow thunder.

E: I have.

S: Yeah, Evan has. Yeah, I can't remember if I have or not. I don't have any clear memory of doing it. It's because they're just really hard to see. They're not common and they're very hard to see in here.

E: More localized.

S: It's a combination of everything.

E: Very localized.

S: Which means that Omori City in Japan is the snowiest city in the world with an average annual snowfall of about 26 feet. It's science. 26 feet.

E: How many people are in this city?

S: Houses get buried in the snow. Houses get buried.

J: Yes, yes.

S: It's amazing.

C: Where is it? Is it at elevation?

S: It's in northern Japan.

E: And what's the population of this city?

S: It's not in the mountains, no. It's just in northern Japan. It's a city. It's populous enough to be called a city. I don't know what the number is.

J: Skiing? Like snow sports are a big deal in Japan.

S: Yeah.

B: Can you imagine their snow removal infrastructure? It must be epic.

S: Yeah. Snow removal, as we know from recent excessive snow in our own part of the country, there's a point beyond which they can't just plow the snow anymore, right? Like you can't just push it to the side.

B: They melt it.

S: There's a couple of things that they do. One is they pull in the back hose. They pick up the snow and they move it. They have to bring it to like a parking lot. They go, okay, this parking lot is now done for the next two months. And they just dump snow, pile it up into huge piles there. You can melt the snow. It's just expensive. The equipment is like $200,000.

J: I saw a guy trying to do it with a flamethrower and the flamethrower did almost nothing.

B: That is not a good way.

G: That's what the hibachi tables were originally for, apparently, was for melting large amounts.

C: 275,000 people in 2020. So it's a big suburb.

G: It's a big city.

J: I'd like to point out that Cara, who knows the least about snow of probably anybody I know, I still – how the hell did you pick the right one first? You are so good at this. It's starting to freak me out.

S: I know.

B: It really took you so long, Jay.

S: I'm sitting here listening to her say absolutely nothing about any of this. She's like, I'll take one.

C: He doesn't know.

J: Cara.

C: A lot going on in there.

S: Right.

J: We should make a meme with Cara. You know, that guy that's always like – you know, the brain guy.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:49:54)

America's leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.  – John Fitzgerald Kennedy, (description of author)

S: All right. Evan, give us a quote.

E: "America's leadership must be guided by learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem." John Fitzgerald Kennedy from his speech that he was going to give the day he was assassinated.

S: Very wise.

E: Yeah.

S: It's very relevant.

E: Just saying.

S: Just saying, yeah.

E: Some quotes are timeless.

S: Well, thank you guys for joining me for this special episode of DC. Thank you guys for coming here.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thanks Steve.

S: It's always nice to visit DC again. We had a lovely crowd. Thank you all.

Signoff

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

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

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