SGU Episode 600

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SGU Episode 600
January 7th 2017
Frilled shark
SGU 599                      SGU 601
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
G: George Hrab
Quote of the Week
We (skeptics) want to teach kids that through science the true wonder and beauty of nature can be revealed. But it's vital they learn how we all can be fooled & tricked. That's where a skeptical approach comes in. Teaching kids not to always believe everything they're told & teaching them how to put claims to the test.
Richard Saunders, The Skeptic Zone
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Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

• SGU's Episode 600, George Hrab's 500^th episode

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 4^th, 2017, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello, everyone.

S: And a special guest rogue, George Hrab. George, welcome back.

G: Happy New Year, everybody. Oh, my gracious.

B: Happy New Year, bro.

G: Goodness thing. Yay.

S: Cara's on a beach somewhere in Mexico or something.

B: Nice. Nice.

E: I think Hawaii, actually.

S: So George is filling in for the first episode. And this is not only the first episode of 2017, this is episode number 600.

B: 600.

E: That was a six blaster salute right there.

G: Oh, my God. Congratulations.

B: I can actually hear Jay getting ready to do that.

G: Congratulations, guys.

J: 600 episodes.

G: That's fantastic.

E: Thanks, George.

S: Thank you.

G: Honestly.

J: Now, George, you hit 500, right?

G: That doesn't matter. It's not about me, Jay. It's about –

B: 500!

G: It happens to me. Every time I hit some milestone, like two weeks before, you guys hit a much bigger milestone than I do. And it's always this deflated balloon sound, kind of just – but it's not.

J: No, but you started after we did. You do it all by yourself.

G: That's true. That's true. It's like five times as difficult because there's just me. Yes. Yes. So I'm actually on show–

E: You have to play five different characters.

G: -2,500. If you really count it that way. But no. No. 600 is great. 500 is fine as well. But yeah. Congratulations, guys. And it's like the fact that the quality has remained as mediocre as it was in the beginning, I think it's really a testament to –

J: Exactly.

S: It's consistency, George.

G: Absolutely. 100 percent.

E: We want the plateau model and I think it's worked well for us.

G: We have show three and after that, it's all – you just ride. You just coast. You just coast, baby. Congratulations.

S: Coasting for 600 episodes.

J: Including you, George, as someone that knows our show really well, do you guys have any favorite things that we've done, any bits, anything that's derivative of this show?

G: Anytime we travel anywhere, it's like crazy. The fact that we're recording the show like in New Zealand or recording the show in some bizarre place.

S: I love that.

G: It's just the coolest thing in the world. So those stand out to me. I don't know if those shows are very good but I don't care because I'm in New Zealand. I mean it's like – it's just so surreal to be there with this extended family. Those are the ones that just blow me away or Las Vegas or wherever.

J: Yeah. I mean we've done a lot of funny things on the show and we've done a lot of live performances and the live stuff to me is always where it really – like George was saying, that's where magic happens because we're together and I think my favorite thing we ever did was the first time we ran the extravaganza in Ohlone.

S: Yeah. Ohlone. Rhymes with Bologna.

E: California.

J: Yeah. That was magic to me.

S: Because it didn't suck.

B: They've all been excellent. They've all been really good. We don't have a clunker in the whole group but that first one was definitely special.

S: But it was special partly because we had no idea because it was the first time we were pulling it off and it didn't suck and we were very happy that it didn't suck.

E: I agree. I agree.

S: George, so –

B: Plus I killed it.

S: George, you're going to do something special to celebrate your 500th episode, right? You're going to do a live streaming event.

G: I am going to do – I took the inspiration from you guys. I know when you had your 10th anniversary, you did a 10-hour show, which I was very honored to be a part of that. I thought, well, what could I do that would be a rip-off but not a massive rip-off? What would be like my Kmart version of an SGU kind of long thing? Oh, you know what? 500th show, let me do a live 500-minute show, which is about eight plus hours. I thought, OK. We'll do that.

E: Well, that's ambitious.

G: That's the plan. It's going to be February 25th, which is a Saturday from noon Eastern until about 8.25 or 8.30, whatever the actual math is. I'll figure that out. There might – there's going to be a ton of special guests. There's going to be all kinds of – it's going to be – There's going to be all the stuff that the Geologic podcast is sort of famous for, but I hope people will tune in anyway.

S: It's a gamble.

G: It's a gamble. But I've never done a live – I mean I've done – at some conventions, I kind of do performances but not really live shows. I thought let me take kind of the thing and see if I can just vamp for 500 minutes basically. I'm super excited. It's going to be a different kind of challenge. But we're going to have all kinds of people Skyping in from literally all over the world. I've got a bunch of really special fun guests lined up, which is something I don't normally do on the show. But I'm really excited to just sit and have conversations. I know – OK, like talk about stuff that stands out. We had that really long extended interview that we did whatever, two years ago at TAM where it was like the – I think it was Cara's – one of her first official things with you guys as they wrote.

E: It was.

G: It was a lovely two-hour just sort of like confessional session where we were all crying and everything. It was – I loved that. It was great. That was so much fun. So I want to kind of capture some of that and do that over the course of the 500 minutes.

S: Are you going to make everybody cry like you made us cry?

G: Yeah.

E: Don't do that. Please.

J: That interview was amazing, Geo, because I live with these guys. First off, Bob and Steve are my brothers. Evan and I have been friends for 20 plus years.

E: 20 plus.

J: And I learned something about everyone that I didn't know and it was weird.

G: Yeah. That's great.

B: You killed it. You did a good job.

G: I love stuff like that. It's just so fun to kind of really – and take your time to be able to really sort of delve into some kind of a thing. I think the thing that stands out at those kind of performances and especially something like I know you guys have done some Facebook live things now is the sort of interaction because very often we're sitting here like we are tonight. We're each in our individual space and we've got the other four or five guys that are on the line with us. But when we're in front of an audience and you get to see sort of the influence and the effect that you have on the listeners and the people that are tuning in, in real time, it's really special. I kind of love that. I kind of like that interactive aspect of it. Even in the small private shows that we do where it's like 20, 30 people or whatever, that's such a different vibe than sort of us just alone with our headphones on in our living rooms wearing a bikini or whatever you may be wearing at the time.

In Memoriam (6:33)

• Follow up 2016 in memoriam Vera Rubin, Carrie Fischer

S: So interestingly, our year-end wrap-up episode, we always do an in memoriam. And I think this is the first time that people of note died after we recorded the show but before the end of the year. And it seemed like there was this spurt of celebrity deaths right at the end of 2016. There's a couple that we want to mention.

J: Carrie Fisher, right? We never even talked about her.

S: Yeah. So Carrie Fisher. Princess Leia died.

E: Oh, gosh.

S: Oh, yeah. Carrie Fisher was December 27th. Vera Rubin was the other one. She died on December 25th. She died on Christmas.

E: Gosh.

S: Yeah. So Carrie Fisher apparently had a massive heart attack while she was about to land on a plane and a passenger did CPR on her. She was obviously taken straight to the hospital. She was in intensive care for a few days, but then she died three days after going into the hospital. So just had a massive heart attack, probably just too much damage. Yeah, couldn't bounce back.

J: Do you guys-

G: And then her mom. And then her mom, you know-

E: Debbie Reynolds.

B: A day or two later.

J: Yeah. That was definitely from stress. That was terrible.

S: That was the next day. It was one day later on the 28th. Debbie Reynolds died. Yeah. We got a lot of questions about that and was that due to, like, did she will herself to die or was it due to the stress? And you never know, right? She had a stroke, which is certainly something that could be induced by stress. I don't have any more details than that. Just a massive stroke. We do see that, right? That sometimes close relatives or whatever of people who die or who are very sick in the hospital will get sick themselves from all the stress and staying up and everything.

B: Stress. Stress can be horrible.

S: So it could be a coincidence, but probably not. Probably it's due to the stress.

J: I'd like to say that Carrie Fisher's death actually made me very, very sad. I mean I just, she's one of the people that is in one of the most important movies or movie franchises of my life.

E: Well, what other female hero character did we know when we were 8, 10, 12, 12 years old, especially from one of the biggest movies? We didn't. She was my first female superhero in a sense.

B: Dinah Girl and Dinah Girl and Electro Woman.

E: That Saturday morning.

S: In all seriousness, we had Wonder Woman.

G: Linda Carter. But yeah, but in a science fiction setting to have a strong female presence, like she totally gets them out of that jam when they're stuck in the hallway there.

B: Oh my God.

G: That's her. She's like, oh, nice plan guys. Let me take care of this.

E: She's a leader. Natural leader. Natural leader.

G: Obviously it's a character and everything, but it's still to, that's a pretty impressive scene to have on four or five, seven, eight, 10 year olds boys watching, watching a gunfight. It's pretty cool. A strong female character.

B: Sure. Who else could give Darth Vader attitude right to his face and survive?

J: And Tarkin.

E: Absolutely.

B: Right, right.

G: The stench.

S: She gave Vader some serious [inaudible]. She was snarky as hell to him when she said Tarkin was holding his leash. I mean, come on. That was pretty cool.

E: It was well played. It was very well done.

G: And the fact that independent of Star Wars, she was such a brilliant writer and such a funny, like aware of her place and aware, aware of her place within sort of the science fiction community and, and could laugh about it and be inspired by it. And yeah, just her, her, her books are just so funny. So great. The whole Wishful Drinking, if you've ever seen that, cause it was a book and then she did a HBO version of it. Just so funny.

S: And then we have to mention that Vera Rubin, who is a forgotten superhero of science has come up on the show more than once. Vera Cooper Rubin, born 1928, died December 25th, 2016. She was an American astronomer who, yeah, studying galaxy rotations, figured out that there's some missing matter in these galaxies. And it took a while for her work to be taken seriously, but she basically discovered dark matter. The fact that it needed to exist. Very, very cool.

G: How old was she?

S: She had a good runtime.

G: How old was she? She was older, right? She was?

S: Yeah, 1928. So is that 88?

Psychic Predictions (10:50)

• Psychic Predictions: The rogues review predictions for 2016 and make their own for 2017

S: The first episode of the calendar year, we always do our psychic predictions. George, you haven't joined us for this before. So we do a couple of things. There's two parts to this. One, we just look at how the psychics did over 2016, because they count on the public generally not paying attention to all of their missed predictions, but we like to keep tabs on that. And then we give our own predictions to see if we could do as well or even better than the psychics. So we'll review the predictions we made one year ago. We'll hold ourselves accountable as well. And then we'll make new predictions for 2017. But first, does anybody have any favorite psychics they'd like to review?

B: Lamont Hamilton found some doozies that he predicted last year. His website says that he's a recognized and respected intuitive spiritual counselor and writer, speaker, and educator known internationally as one of the top clairvoyants in the world. Blah, blah, blah. Never heard of this guy, but he's one of the top.

E: He's one of the top, Bob.

B: So here's just a smattering of some of the things he said. A discovery will prove that some dinosaurs were alive at the same time humans were on the earth.

E: Verified. Fact.

B: Unless you're being goofy and saying birds, give me a break, that's just riddiculous. Oh, here's a good one. Some countries will send their nuclear biological waste to the moon or other off-earth places to get rid of it, creating an international outcry. It's ridiculous.

S: It's not going to happen.

B: It's just as enticing as it may be to think, let's just launch this nuclear waste into the sun. Talk about the best garbage disposal. The only thing better is a black hole. The expense of just launching – imagine what it would cost to launch tons and tons of that stuff. It's just way too much. To get other governments to let you do it is ridiculous as well because as you can imagine, one big mistake and you can lay waste to the countryside with radioactive material.

E: Space elevator.

B: It's not going to happen.

G: Superman 4 did it.

B: Oh, yeah.

E: He did.

B: Oh, my God. That movie was so bad.

E: Bob, what about a space elevator? How about a space elevator to get the garbage out there?

G: Space disposal.

B: That would definitely be a great help.

S: But honestly, by the time we get the technology to cost-effectively dispose of garbage off-earth, we'll just recycle whatever it is.

B: Sure.

S: Why would we bother getting physical stuff off our planet? We would just use that physical stuff as raw material.

B: We've got nuclear reactor designs that are specifically made to burn that waste.

S: Diamond batteries, baby.

B: Yeah, baby.

E: Yes. Can't wait for those.

B: He's got a couple more here. Another one that caught my attention. The discovery of an ancient advanced underground city will stun scientists and rewrite history as we know it, possibly located in the US or Canada.

S: Why even bother with the detail? If you're correct, you don't need to say, and I called it, it was totally going to be in Canada.

G: On a Tuesday.

B: Yeah, right? That's going to really enhance your street cred if you knew the location. One more I've got here. He predicted that Marco Rubio will be the Republican front runner for the 2016 presidential election.

S: What a loser.

B: That did not happen.

S: I did a new guy this year. Tony Morris. He was featured on the Huffington Post, the HuffPo, and this was a focus on political predictions for 2016, which I thought, since this was an unusual year politically, we'll see how we did. So he gets this first question is, what kind of year as a country are we going to have in 2016? Here's his answer. The theme that I'm getting is world peace.

J: What?

E: Oh, man.

S: That's a pretty dramatic fail right there. World peace. And then he just goes on that theme for a while. So some of the issues he thinks that, all right, what will be one of the big issues in the upcoming election? Number one, gun violence and gun control. Wrong. That was nowhere. Did you guys hear anything about gun control?

E: Hardly at all. They hardly touched on it.

S: Just the claim that Hillary is going to take away your guns. But other that, it wasn't she wasn't making it a big issue. And then presidential candidates, he would not put his nickel down. He equivocated, which is one method that the psychics use. He did say, I'm seeing Donald Trump continuing to be smug about the whole campaign. I see his arms up as if he's declaring victory. That doesn't necessarily mean he'll be elected, but he'll come to a point when he sees himself victorious in some way. He'll say to himself, my work is done here. So that's like the biggest non-prediction.

E: That's a prediction?

B: Oh, my God.

E: That's nothing.

S: Then he goes also, Hillary Clinton is part of my vision having to do with the peace effort. And like, she's going to be playing a big role. Well, no, she lost. So she's done.

E: She's out. She's out.

G: You know, Steve, he spelt world peace, W-H-I-R-L-E-D. That's what he meant. It's going to be a whirlwind of peace is going to be thrown to the sun. That's what he meant.

E: Oh, and he spelt peace P-E-A-S, so like the vegetable. World peas. Okay. So that's what he meant. And then the rest of his stuff is just vacuous nonsense.

S: So that was a pretty big fail.

E: Nice. Well, speaking of nonsense, Psychic Nikki, which always seems to come up. I don't know. You just type in psychic predictions and Nikki is always there. And as usual, Nikki likes to not only give you a handful of psychic predictions, she likes to give you volumes of psychic predictions hundreds, literally hundreds. That way, if a few actually hit, she looks like she's a superstar in the world of psychics, which apparently she is.

B: It's a good strategy though, right?

E: It is.

B: It's a good strategy. I mean, God damn, what the hell? If you're going to be a psychic, go for it.

E: Yep. Throw it all out there, whatever little tiny bit might stick, then you can take credit for it. She says, a city will turn sideways after earthquake activity. A city will turn sideways. What does that, does that happen? Is there a record of that even?

S: Like the whole city will rotate in the ground.

G: I mean, no, it's just when you knock a snow globe off of your desk, that's, you know.

E: That counts then. Bob, people are going to use jet packs for transportation. I don't know about you, but I almost bumped into another jet pack on my way to work this morning.

B: She actually predicted that last year?

E: Mm hmm. Yep.

B: That's just nuts. That's just crazy. That's just like, I mean, I guess she just predicted a city is going to be sideways. So what am I surprised?

E: Exactly.

B: But wow.

E: She's also one to not get too specific for, there are a few examples of that. One of her psychic predictions was a spaceship landing. Now you could, you could define, I mean, if you take the experimental SpaceX and it landed. So I suppose, yes, technically you could do that. I'm doubt that's what she meant, but she left it open. Oh, here's one. President Obama is in danger. That's a psychic prediction.

J: Of what? Of losing the presidency?

E: Well, he was going to be out anyways, but right, exactly, Jay. No specifics. And finally, I'll say that she predicted a pet parrot will kill a movie star. Now, is that the movie star you're talking about? A pet parrot will kill a movie star.

J: What?

E: Well, even if you take that to its widest, most generous interpretation, I don't think any movie stars died of pets of any kind, let alone parrots in 2016.

J: Now let's talk about that for a second. Do they, they're like these crazy oddball predictions just in case, like they have to sit there and go, if this crazy thing happens, I'm going to hit it. I'm going to hit a gold gold mine. Right?

E: Yeah. Or it's either that, Jay, or they have a hard, especially people like Nikki who have to come up with hundreds and hundreds of these things, different ones every single year, you start running out of ideas. So you have to come up with these really unique scenarios like pet parrots killing movie stars. I mean, why not?

G: It's funny, Evan, because I had Nikki for one as well. And one prediction she made was a worldwide pasta shortage.

S: Did she really?

G: Yeah. Which is like, it's like pastas it's like flour and water basically. So I just, even that, like, how would that even, I mean, it's not like pastas.

J: I know, George, think about that. Like if there was a worldwide pasta shortage, they would be, that means there would have to be a worldwide flour shortage. If there's a worldwide flour shortage, there's no other shit's going to be short too, right?

G: There's no pasta mines that they're going to have to like, try to find new sources of pasta. So I thought that was.

E: Remember those commercials? They used to pick pasta off the tree.

G: The old rigatoni trees.

B: That's scary, man.

S: Unless some pasta factories blow up or something.

E: George, did you find anything else cool for Nikki?

B: Right, right.

G: No, that was the one that stood out for Nikki, but there was another one. There's a lovely woman called Baba Vanga. She's a Bulgarian.

S: Oh yeah, Baba Vanga.

G: She predicted that Europe-

E: With the big white hair, right? It's kind of like this afro.

G: Yeah, I guess. I didn't really quite see a drawing or anything, but she said Europe in 2016 will be a vast wasteland and will cease to exist. It'll be devoid of any form of life. Now I haven't checked on this yet, but I don't think that happened. And the great thing about this prediction.

S: Yeah, I don't have any memory of that.

E: I don't follow the news every day. But here's the thing. She died in, this Baba Vanga person died in 1996, but she has this, these volumes of predictions that her followers still publish in regular intervals for her. So that one was, that one was pretty as wrong as wrong could be. That was pretty exciting because Europe is still there.

S: Does she get specific like with dates or with years?

E: Yeah. This was like, this was for 2016. Yeah. And again, she's, she's been dead for 20 years. So, but still it's it's, if you're going to predict, predict big, I think it's good to go all out.

E: Absolutely. That way when no one's left on the planet, you can say, I told you so.

S: And what do her followers say when, when her predictions fail?

G: Oh, it's just the, they sort of scrub the site and they just move on from that.

S: Go on to the next one.

B: They must be used to it by now.

G: Or that they've somehow misinterpreted it. That's all.

S: Jay, do you, do you have anything?

J: Yeah. Yeah. I, you know what? This is really not a prediction. I was just reading a lot of stuff and this is, this struck me. I just wanted to read this sentence to you. This is from a, a psychic named Suzanne Bishop and she is considered one of the Pittsburgh psychics. There's a collection of psychics apparently that Pittsburgh has that they're proud of.

E: I saw that. Yeah.

J: These are her words by the way. The overall sense that I get intuitively is that there is a mass awakening of people. What that means is that people for the first time are letting go of the ties that bind them to base realities of life and are freeing themselves to the nuances of spirit.

E: Finally.

J: You know, that is the psychic techno babble right there.

B: Yeah. Right?

E: Deepak would be impressed.

S: So the psychics did as well for 2016 as they do every year, which means worse than I think random because they I think a lot of the predictions they make are just for their entertainment value in the reading the prediction itself. They're not trying to like be correct. I mean, if they are, obviously again, they'll forget it, but I think they don't care. You know, like the, like Nikki's predictions, like the city turning sideways. That's just for the, the shock value of the prediction itself and there's no expectation that anyone's going to keep track of those going forward.

B: Yeah. They want it to be a fun read. They want people to say when they read it, wow, imagine if that happens and then that's it. Then you forget about it. Big deal.

S: We also like to talk about the predictions that psychics didn't make. In other words, what were the big news items of 2016 that psychics missed? No one predicted the emergence of the Zika virus, although when I-

E: Not specifically.

S: -there is one psychic claiming that they hit it. Listen to this prediction. This was in 2013, an epidemic is rising. I had a vision of a small bug changing into a large bug, the size of a hand. It had wings and long, sharp hook like legs. A deadly disease is coming. Then the bug multiplied and begin attacking a suburbia, invading the houses and seeking out people. So no, right. They're talking about some giant hand sized bug, but then again, the followers are like, oh, but it's a mosquito spread Zika and it's an infection and a bug. And that's good enough. No, that was not even close.

E: Bug.

G: Did anyone say Prince? Did anyone say Bowie? Did anyone say George Michael? Like no one said that.

E: They say celebrities, but they don't name them. Not usually.

S: And then with Trump, although we'll get to that in a minute, yes, some people did predict Trump would win, but only after he was being nominated. So only when it comes down to the 50-50, nobody was predicting it before it looked, he looked inevitable. You know what I mean? In terms of getting the nomination.

E: Not the psychics. No.

S: Not the psychics. Right. We'll see. Maybe somebody, maybe somebody predicted it.

E: We'll see.

S: If anyone out there did have a psychic twinkle, you think that they would pick up on some of the really big things, but it's always things that are vague or likely or ridiculous and they just expect no one's going to keep track of it. Or they use the gunshot method and they'll cherry pick the one out of 300 that they can argue sort of came true.

Results of Predictions for 2016

ROGUE'S Results (24:47)

S: But now it comes to the fun part because we like to make quote unquote psychic predictions and test ourselves against the professional fake psychics and see how we do. So who wants to go first? Evan, why don't you go first? Because I think you had the most impressive. Tell us what you did. You predicted for 2016 and then give us your 2017 predictions.

E: All right. Well, I'll go over. I had made three predictions for 2016. I also have three for 17. I'll go with the ones I got wrong for 16 first. My first prediction was that Apple would either buy a bank or buy Tesla Motors. And you guys made me narrow it down to one or the other. So I said Tesla Motors. And no, that did not happen. In fact, nor did they buy a bank.

S: Yeah. So you couldn't get either one.

E: I was going with the premise that they were sitting in a ton, a ton of cash, like more than any company on the planet. And they had to do something with this cash. So some big purchase was going to be had. It did not happen.

S: Not a bad gamble.

E: No, it wasn't a bad gamble. My next, the second one was element 120, Unbinyllium was going to have some very promising results in the news in 2016. Again, that's element number 120. In fact, no. There were several attempts to create the element and actually have it in a stable state where they could measure it and verify it. But the attempts failed. Basically, what they said is that they don't have the technology yet. They don't have the colliders powerful enough or that can withstand the heat that would have to be created in order to form that element. So they said, we're not there yet. They said, look out though. The next generation, I read, they said the next generation, 25 years, 120, 124 and 126 are coming. In fact, they've already been named. And they said those will have the technology. So maybe 20 years from now, my prediction will come true. So I was wrong there. And my third prediction was President Trump. So yeah, I suppose that one was impressive only because there were still all the Republican candidates still there. It was early in the primary season. The first vote hadn't even been cast yet. And I had him going sort of all the way on that.

S: Now, I listened. I listened back to that episode. And you said, yeah, my prediction is two words, President Trump. And we laughed.

J: Oh, I know, right?

E: We belly laughed.

B: God.

J: Evan, what were you thinking about with that?

E: I went with a system of it's not a poll. It's a it's an analysis of presidential elections that a professor from Stony Brook College has been using since, oh, gosh, I think the last since the 80s, since the 1980s, he started using this measure of how to predict who the next president will be and use a bunch of factors. I think there's a set of 13 criteria. And if any seven of the 13 criteria hit, it means that's who the president will be. And it worked. And since since 1980, it's worked for every presidential prediction up to Trump. And he said, if you go back and you post it and apply it to the past elections dating back to like 1900, it works for every single presidency from 1900 forward with with the exception of one election, which was 1960, the John Kennedy over Richard Nixon election, which is one of the more controversial actually presidential elections.

J: But didn't you agree, though, at the time that you thought it was kind of crazy, too?

E: Yes. But in a scary kind of way, no, I was hoping in a sense that that I would be wrong and that this time it wouldn't it wasn't going to work out. So one half of my brain was laughing and the other half was kind of biting its fingernails, so to speak.

S: Right. That was one solid hit Evan.

E: It was pretty solid. Yeah. It was right on the button.

S: Bob, why don't you go next? You didn't do bad last year.

B: Yeah. Nailed it. Not as hard as as Evan. But I got one. All right. So I said that the level of public disdain for Martin Shkreli will reach such heights that he will be eviscerated. That unfortunately did not happen. Came close, but didn't really happen.

S: He was metaphorically eviscerated.

B: OK. Yeah. So I kind I think I can get maybe a third of a point there. Maybe even half. The second the second one was bad, especially in hindsight. I said I predicted dark matter will be directly observed. That unfortunately did not happen. And just recently it was announced that that it might never happen. We may never really observe dark matter. I think Forbes put out an article. That's where I saw it. Anywhere. Anyway, basically gravity may be the only way that it will ever reveal itself to us. And that will that will limit what we can actually determine about its true nature.

G: They're calling it Bob's law.

B: Yeah. I think I think Sean Carroll blogged about it a bit. He's talking something about five sigma. I mean, so that I didn't read what he said, but it doesn't sound good. So we may just have to get used to the idea of dark matter. Never you know, never really nearly.

S: That's sign missing. You had dark matter and observation correct. You just were in the wrong direction there. So still something coming through the psychic ways we're coming through.

B: You call that sign missing, Steve?

S: Yeah, that's what it's called. Sign missing.

B: Oh, interesting. I was thinking you might take away the half a point I earned with the first one because I was so wrong. But I like the way you're interpreting it.

S: That's the psychic interpretation. When you're completely wrong, at least you were on the right topic. So you get credit for that.

B: Oh, I love it. I love it. So then the third prediction wasn't as stunning as saying President Trump, but it was nevertheless still correct. And it was that we would detect gravitational waves in 2016, which we did. My science story of the year, it was an amazing observation, discovery, birth of a new type of astronomy. So yeah, so that was cool and I nailed that one, but it wasn't that hard.

S: So I'll give you two points, one for gravitational waves and a half a point each for dark matter.

E: That's pretty good.

B: Very generous. Thank you.

E: Well done.

Rogues' Predictions for 2017

ROGUE'S Predictions (31:14)

S: And what are your predictions for next year?

B: Oh, okay. I predict that Emma Morano will die in 2017. The fact that she's the oldest woman alive has nothing to do with my prediction at 117.

J: How old is she? Oh, so at 117? Statistically, she could only possibly survive three more years, Bob.

B: I'm feeling pretty good about that one.

G: So what year was she born?

B: 117 years ago.

E: 1899.

B: Yeah, I know she has spanned-

E: Isn't she the last living person from the 1800s?

B: Three centuries. Okay, my second prediction, CRISPR will have its biggest breakthrough in 2017 yet, curing a deadly disease.

E: Curing it?

B: Yes. Yeah, baby.

E: I hope so. Oh boy.

B: And my final prediction for 2017, evidence will surface in 2017 that the so-called dark flow, which is the anomalous motion of matter towards something perhaps beyond the observable universe, is due to interactions with the multiverse. Just saying.

E: Multiverse. I love it.

S: That's pretty bold.

B: It's kind of out there. Yeah, pretty bold. It's not a city tipping on its side, but it's still old.

E: All right, my 2017 predictions, I do have three of them. Okay, in 2017, I predict that by the end of the year, the JFK assassination and its related conspiracy theories will reach a new fervor and spawn a whole new generation of JFK conspiracy theorists, kind of the new generation to take up the mantle. And there's going to be records declassified later this year by law, and I think that-

B: Really?

E: Yes. It's going to lead to a groundswell and sort of this grassroots movement that I think is going to be unanticipated by the media and a lot of other people. I think by the end of the year, we'll be talking about it as one of the top stories.

B: Oh my God.

G: So Evan is saying that Trump did it. Trump killed Kennedy. That's what Evan's saying.

E: Breaking news. Breaking news. Evan, not the skeptics guide.

S: Trump says Ted Cruz's father did.

E: Oh my gosh. We're going to start going on all of this. That's a show unto itself.

B: Did he really?

E: It was, gosh, I don't even know where to go there. Prediction number two, the lost treasure of the San Miguel will be discovered. This is considered to be perhaps the most valuable undiscovered shipwreck with its cargo of gold and gems and everything else yet to be discovered. And I think this will be the year that they finally find it. They estimate it's worth at least $2 billion of sunken treasure.

J: Wow.

B: Oh my God.

S: Evan, is this technically treasure?

J: Treasure.

E: Of course. Of course. And thank you for correcting. I should have used the preprediction when saying treasure.

B: Can you imagine?

E: We miss you, Perry.

S: Two billion. Two billion.

E: Or more.

B: I mean, if you found it, I mean, you would get a good chunk of that, wouldn't you? But would the originating country have dibs? How does that work?

E: Oh, they go to court over these things, I think, all the time, international courts. And there are so many treasure claims that have to get fought over. It's a big deal.

S: Yeah, because they're not going to just let you walk away with $2 billion. Someone's going to want to fight for that.

B: You know, I would say give me $200 million, take the rest, here.

S: Yeah, you've got to get at least a finder's fee, right? First of all, you've got to pay for the expedition, which could be $100 million.

B: Right. That's true.

G If you go to court, though, you have to go into arbitration, because that's, you know.

B: Nice, nice. Good one, Gio.

S: That's right.

E: Oh, and my last prediction. Have you guys ever heard of Cicada 3301?

S: I've heard of cicadas.

E: Cicada 3301, name given to an enigmatic organization that on six occasions has posted a set of complex puzzles and alternate reality games to possibly recruit code breakers from the public. And in the past years, they've released a bunch of puzzles. Nothing new in a couple of years, but 2017, here comes the latest from Cicada 3301. Oh, and it's also rumored that it's perhaps just a cult, not actually a code breaking.

S: Not a government.

E: Right. Not like with the Enigma machine from the Imitation Game, where they brought people in to solve crossword puzzles and sort of recruited them that way. So that was the analog version of apparently what they're doing here. But some people believe it's just kind of a cult of people who are nihilists, I suppose.

S: Their identity is not public?

E: That's correct. Right. It's covert. And apparently people who are brought in, they don't say a damn thing about it once they're informed that they've solved the puzzle and therefore part of the club now. So very, very secretive.

J: Interesting.

S: It's the Illuminati. We all know it's the Illuminati. Come on.

E: There you go. Three solid predictions for 2017. Let's see any psychic put up those kinds of predictions.

S: All right, Jay, how'd you do last year?

J: I don't know. How did I do?

S: You made three predictions, Jay. One was that solar panel technology will take off in 2016.

J: Thank you.

S: I'll give you a half a point for that because it was vague.

J: All right.

S: Number two, that AI would take a big leap forward. And I think you get a full credit for that because of the whole thing.

B: Full?

S: Yeah.

J: Thank you.

E: Sure.

J: Of course.

S: And then your third one was that space tourism will take off in 2016. And that was a total fail.

J: I was only one or two years early on that.

S: Yeah, more than one or two. So I'll give you one and a half for those three. One for the AI, a half for the solar panels, none for the space tours.

J: Yeah, but come on. The solar panels though, Steve, what are you going to say about that? Listen.

S: Half a point.

J: Wait, hold on. I got to tell you something. Elon Musk announced his trifecta this year, which revolves around his solar roofs. Thank you. That was pretty damn amazing.

S: All right. Two thirds.

J: OK. Good enough.

S: Because you were vague. You were vague about what you could, there was still just incremental advances in the technology itself, et cetera. But yeah, I think we did turn a little bit of a corner with solar panels this year. Do you have anything for 2017?

J: I have three predictions for 2017. The first one, the ice shelf will take a massive hit this year.

S: Which one?

J: The one north of us. Yes.

S: The Arctic ice shelf.

J: The Arctic ice shelf. Yes. Thank you.

E: Arctic.

J: The second one, science funding will take a massive hit this year.

S: Yeah. Going on a limb there.

E: Very depressing.

J: OK.

J: My last one. Snoop Dogg will take a massive hit this year.

E: OK. So two predictions from Jay this year.

S: OK. All right. Last year I made three predictions. The first one, a sizable asteroid will pass within the orbit of the moon.

J: That's right. I remember that.

S: Yeah. And that one is definitely correct.

J: How did you know, Steve?

S: Because it happens every year.

E: Steve, you're giving away your best secrets.

S: There was a bunch of them that passed within the orbit of the moon this year. The closest one, the biggest one was 86 meters. So that's sizable.

E: OK. I'd say that's sizable. That would do some serious.

S: That was just within the orbit of the moon. And then there was another one. There was a bunch in the 5 to 20 meter range. Some very close. Some within satellite range.

B: That's messed up right there.

S: Within geosynchronous orbit range.

J: That's crazy, man.

S: But that's – yeah, that happens all the time. Then number two, this is totally 100 percent wrong. I predicted that there would be a brokered Republican convention resulting in the nomination of Marco Rubio. That was total fail. And then prediction number three, new hominid or new hominoid species closest relative to shared common ancestor between humans and chimps would be discovered and nothing. There was nothing even close to that. I give myself one point. One out of three.

B: You really screwed up, man. You did the worst.

S: No. I got one. Evan got one.

E: I got one. Mine was a big one, but I got it.

S: You got two. And Jay got one and three quarters.

B: I thought you gave Evan like a point and a half.

S: No.

E: No.

S: No. The other two were dead wrong. Now Cara, who's not here, she sent us – she recorded a review of her predictions and also made her own predictions for 2017. So let's hear what she has to say for herself.

C: Hey, guys. Cara here and I'm so sorry that I am missing the first episode back of the SGU. And by I'm so sorry, I mean I'm not really sorry at all because I am technically on a beach in Hawaii right now while this is airing. I predicted last year that decriminalization or legalization of marijuana will continue to spread across America, but it won't see federal legislation yet. And I'm going to give myself a ding, ding, ding. That was a damn good prediction. In true psychic fashion, I just made a super vague prediction based on things that were already happening. And of course, the momentum continued because this year we saw recreational legalization in California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine. And we saw medical legalization in Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Montana. So now a big swath of the country is covered with either legal medical marijuana or legal recreational marijuana. Let's see. Prediction number two was kind of a joke prediction. I said that Apple will develop Maps 2.0 that won't drive you into a lake. Of course, those of you who have iPhones and you know how crap Apple Maps can be, you probably use Google Maps on your phone. That did not happen this year, unfortunately. So Apple Maps still sucks. I still recommend not using it if you don't or if you, yeah, if you don't want to end up in a lake. All right. Prediction number three for 2016, I think this is my best one yet. It is revealed that Andy Kaufman never died. And he's actually Donald Trump, the GOP's Tony Clifton. How relevant was Donald Trump in January? I guess we knew he was running by then? I don't remember, but I remember that I made this prediction. And I think this one may be true. Those of you who don't remember Tony Clifton, he was one of Andy Kaufman's, I think, better characters. And there's a lot of mystique around this character because he brilliantly didn't always play this character himself. He was like a sleazy lounge singer in Vegas and was super mean to everybody. And sometimes he would get his brother to play him or he would get his business partner to play him. So he would actually open for himself or Andy Kaufman might walk on stage in the middle of this performance. So it'd confuse a lot of people. Sometimes people would try to book Tony Clifton, hoping that it would be cheaper and Andy Kaufman would just like not show up for that performance and get somebody who wasn't him to play him, which was kind of genius. But Tony Clifton continued to make appearances long after Andy Kaufman's death. So you never know. Could be our president-elect. All right. So now I've got to make my predictions. This is so weird without like talking to you guys directly. I know you're all there. I'm going to make more serious predictions this year because I've had a lot more time to think about what's going on in science and where I think things might actually end up. And so the first prediction that I'm going to make is about dark matter. I'm thinking that there may be a chance, just like we had this past year with gravitational waves, that some of the dark matter experiments that have been online are actually poised to make some real detections. And I'm hoping that 2017 is the year that we finally have a little bit more concrete evidence of the existence of dark matter. And maybe it will help us be on our way to solving this decades old puzzle. So that's my first prediction. We will have some evidence, some new evidence that further supports the theory of dark matter that's a bit more tangible than anything that we have right now. My next prediction has to do with CRISPR. And I guess this is an obvious one simply because CRISPR is all the rage. Genetic manipulation is all the rage right now. It's gotten to be cheaper and more accessible. But I think we're specifically going to see more work being done in gene drives. And so we might see some wider kind of adoption of the gene drive. And we may actually see some bigger experimental uses to help to fight disease, especially in things like mosquito populations. So I mean, kind of a cop out because we've already started to see that. But I do think that that's going to ramp up this year. So maybe I should come up with something that's a bit, I don't know, out there. And I'm going to say that we are going to fight harder than ever to protect science in 2017, that the incoming administration is going to push some legislation through, along with Congress that's going to be more than willing to see it come to pass that undoes some work that we've done when it comes to environmental progress, and when it comes to budgetary progress with, let's say, the NIH and also NASA. And we're going to have to work that much harder to continue the important work that's being done on the science front in the face of a lot of adversity. That's going to be my third prediction. Let's hope it doesn't come true. All right, guys, enjoy the rest of the show. I miss you, but I got to get back to the beach.

S: All right, George, you weren't here last year, so you had no predictions for 2016. But do you want to risk some predictions for 2017?

G: I consulted my Magic 8-Ball, and I do have three predictions for 2017. My first prediction is that there's going to be the announcement of a movie which is going to feature a fully CGI-ed deceased actor as the lead character. I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know who it's going to be.

B: Ooh, I like it.

G: It's going to be some full Moff Tarkin-type deal, but in the starring role. So it might even be like a young Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry when he's 19 or something like that. So it's going to be a younger or living version of a famous actor in a brand new production starring in the movie. That's the first prediction.

B: That's a cool prediction. I like it.

E: I'm sure there are estate hopes it comes true.

G: Yeah. It'll be an announcement. It'll take like five years to film or something, but it'll be announced next year. My second prediction is that the next food trend along the lines of gluten-free and non-GMO is going to be moonlight-based. It's going to be something – I'm not sure exactly what, but I'm getting this sense of moonlight and that lunar-activated food that's grown somehow in moonlight, food that's exposed to moonlight, and this is going to be a thing.

B: A bra that strangles you in the moonlight?

G: There's that too. Very good. Very good. Yes.

E: They call it nightshade.

G: Yeah. Some kind of moonlight-related food thing.

J: I like it.

G: That's going to be the next big trend.

J: All right, man.

G: And then the third prediction is one member of the SGU is going to buy a new car and accidentally drive it into the ocean. That is my prediction. I don't know which one of you guys or gals is going to do it, but I have a sense that there's going to be a new car.

E: Define accidental.

B: And ocean.

G: Well, look, I can't explain details. I just get visions. I'm not responsible for the visions. I'm just a conveyor.

E: That's right. We are only messengers.

G: Yes. Yes.

E: We are vessels.

S: Interesting.

G: So those are my three.

B: Creative predictions. Creative. Nice job.

E: I like them.

S: I have to give you my predictions.

G: Oh, yes.

E: Steve. Yes. Yes. Please.

S: Yeah. So for 2017, number one, there will be direct observational confirmation of planet nine.

J: From outer space?

S: Yes.

B: Direct. Direct observational confirmation.

S: By the way, Bob, for 2015, you predicted that there would be a Kuiper belt object bigger than Pluto discovered.

E: And you were, ooh.

S: I will give you credit for that for 2016 because I think the planet nine fits that.

E: Really? Credit? Wow.

S: One year early. Yeah. You get some extra credit.

J: That's bullshit.

B: Oh, my God. That's how this works. That's how this works.

E: Listen to all our predictions.

S: Psychic rules. Psychic rules. Okay. Prediction number two. Here's my high probability prediction. The FDA will fail to do its job and properly regulate homeopathic products.

J: No, don't even say that.

B: You think that's high probability?

E: But what about all the good stuff they've done lately?

S: We're waiting for that. No, you're thinking of the FTC.

E: Oh, crap.

S: This is the FDA. We're still waiting for the FDA's decision on what they're going to do about homeopathic products. And I predict they are going to bitterly disappoint me, but we shall see.

E: There's a remedy for that, by the way.

S: I hope I get that one wrong, but we'll see. And then my third prediction is just three words. Quantum computing breakthrough.

B: Oh. Okay.

S: Quantum computing breakthrough. I could get more specific, but I don't want to.

E: That's a safe place to be.

B: I could get more specific, but I can't.

E: But then I'd have to kill you.

S: So we'll see. We'll see. All right, George, maybe we'll have to bring you back next year so you can see how you did with your predictions.

G: Okay.

E: Yes. Yes.

G: It's a date.

S: No cheating and driving into the ocean, guys. That has to happen organically.

G: In a new car.

S: All right. We're going to run through some news items.

News Items

Motivated Reasoning (51:48)

• http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/more-evidence-for-motivated-reasoning/

S: Do you guys know what motivational reasoning is? Essentially, if you want to believe something or deny something, people are apparently very talented at figuring out a way to do that. They can twist around logic, cherry pick facts, deny facts, whatever, so that they arrive at the conclusion that gives them a shot of dopamine and makes them feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, very, very common. I know we've talked about this on the show before, and just want to give a quick update. There was an interesting study that came out. It was a small study, but they used fMRI to look at what's happening inside the brains of people who may or may not be engaged in motivational reasoning.

B: Why do you call it motive? I've never heard of it as motivational.

S: It's motivated reasoning. It's motivated.

B: Yeah. Okay.

S: It's motivated reasoning. This is what they did. They had 40 subjects that were self-described politically liberal, and then they looked at them with an fMRI scan while they were being told facts that would contradict a political position that they probably held, given that they were self-identified liberals. They were also given facts that would contradict beliefs that were not very ideological or political. So, like, for example, they might be told that, like, an example of a political claim would be the U.S. spends too much money of its resources on the military, and then the counterclaim was that Russia's nuclear arsenal is twice the size of the U.S.'s. That's not true, by the way. So some of the claims, the counterclaims that they gave were true, some were exaggerated, and some were wrong. Apparently Russia had, our estimate is they have 7,300 warheads while the U.S. has 7,100. So they have a few more than the U.S. does, but not twice. Then they looked to see what parts of the brain light up during political counterclaims and non-political counterclaims. And during the political counterclaims, more of the brain lit up, and specifically parts of the frontal lobe engaged in what we call the default mode network, which may be involved in things like identity, which was one of the hypotheses of the researchers, and also the amygdala, which is involved in emotion. These kinds of studies are always really hard to interpret because there's a lot of confounding variables, factors that it's hard to account for, and the small subject size, because fMRI scans are expensive, so you can't do a lot of them unless you have a massive grant. There's a lot of, the signal to noise ratio is very low with fMRI scans, so there's all sorts of things could be going on inside the heads of these subjects. Plus it's hard to control for things like what their emotional investment is in a particular belief and maybe the reaction was because they happen to know that the counterclaim is not true, or it has to do with how firmly or how confidently they believe in the claim. This one study doesn't really tell us much, but it does suggest that there's more of an emotional reaction when being told facts that run contrary to an opinion that is tied up with your identity versus something that's neutral, that you don't have an emotional investment in. To back up that evaluation, they also surveyed the subjects along the way to see if their opinions about the facts changed after they were told the counter information, and the more political the claim that was being contradicted, the less it changed, or the less political the more they were willing to change their mind based upon the new information that they were given. And that's consistent with other psychological studies looking at motivated reasoning. So for example, there have been multiple studies where they show that people basically are rational, and this is I think the bit that oftentimes the press misses when they report on these studies. You guys have heard this, the backlash effect where people will dig in their heels when you contradict their belief with new information. Yeah, but that's actually not what people do most of the time. Most of the time if you give people new information, they'll update their beliefs based on that new information.

E: Generally speaking.

S: Yeah, they won't discard what they previously knew. They'll just incorporate the new information with their previous information and come to a new belief about whatever it is. But if it's an emotionally invested belief, especially one that is connected to their identity, then they resist, they fight it tooth and nail. So that's where the motivated reasoning comes in. Most people have someone in their lives who have a firmly held political opinion or belief or whatever. And if you want to see motivated reasoning in action, my God, it's easy to find examples of that.

G: Is there some evolutionary benefit to that in terms of you're turning your political ideology to sort of a tribal one, and that helps you maintain your group or something like that? Is there some kind of advantage to that kind of thinking?

S: That's the speculation, right? But it's hard, obviously, to scientifically prove or disprove that. The idea is that people are tribal and we tend to have a group cohesion. So common beliefs do serve the purpose of increasing group cohesion. And the notion is that if you're going to be willing to give your life for the tribe, you have to have a huge emotional investment in your identity as part of the in-group and in the beliefs that bind that group together. So that all makes sense. It's a very, very difficult thing to research empirically. But that's the thinking, is that it's tied up in our tribalism and our tendency to think in terms of in-groups and out-groups, which is a well-established fact of the human condition.

G: Because it's so strong. It's so incredibly strong.

S: Oh, yeah.

J: So what can be done about this, Steve?

S: Yeah, that's a good question. You can only really do something about it for yourself.

E: Self-awareness?

S: Yeah, it's all about self-awareness. So I think what's important is that I don't think you could turn, become non-emotional. I don't think that the goal shouldn't be to become a Vulcan because we're not Vulcans, right? My strategy is to have no emotions. But what I do think works is if your identity is that of a critical thinker, right? That of a skeptic, where you say, all right, I'm not going to identify with any particular conclusion or alleged fact, but rather with a process of evaluating claims, right? So that means part of your identity is your willingness to change your mind in the light of new information. So it kind of short circuits the motivated reasoning. So you're essentially saying my identity is as somebody who doesn't engage in motivated reasoning.

G: I think it's also exposure too. It's also that idea of being open to hearing different and new opinions contrary to yours, not being afraid to hear them. Because that exposure can influence you positively. And that can be very dangerous or very, very intimidating sometimes. Like we get into our own bubbles of, not even politically, but just whatever tribal thing we have. And we don't even want to expose ourselves to secondary. I mean, that happened to me during the election where I had certain friends that had on Facebook, let's say, that had very different political opinions from mine. And my instinct was to block them. And I had to fight that instinct. And I thought, no, I want to hear what they're saying. So whether I can see it has any merit to it or not, but at least hear what the material is that's coming up from the other side. So that's a process that you can do to try to not surround yourself with too much like-mindedness, even though it's very comforting.

S: Exactly. I mean, I think it's important to seek out other opinions to actually look for people who disagree with you. Or that's part of my process whenever I'm evaluating any scientific claim or whatever, is once I hear one side, it's like, OK, who disagrees with this? Why do they disagree with this? What's the other side saying? And try to give it the best chance possible, right? Try to always – that's the principle of charity as well, because it's – your knee jerk is to find a reason to reject things that disagree with where you already are. So you have to say, OK, what's the best case I could try to – like, it's almost like a debating technique where you – like, now I'm going to make an argument for the other side, right? And it's a great exercise, I got to tell you. Because what I hear all the time is people attacking straw men, right? They're mischaracterizing the other side when they're arguing against it. And it's – and especially like with political opinions, almost there's probably some confirmation bias involved here, but my perception is that almost always people are very unkind to the other side when characterizing what they believe, right? Like, no, you should actually make a specific effort to try to understand or make the best case possible for the side that you disagree with. And that's probably closer to the truth than your knee jerk, which is to straw man it, right? Which is to say, they're just stupid or whatever. But that takes a lot more work. That takes a lot of intellectual work.

B: But I like thinking that they're stupid.

S: Yeah, it's easy just to think that they're stupid or whatever or evil or greedy or whatever, just to simplistically label them and to say that all their beliefs are ridiculous, et cetera. That's a very, very seductive trap to fall into. So all of these things are high energy. They're high mental energy. But you have to constantly work to try to maintain that. And it can be exhausting. But once – that's what being a skeptic is really about, though. Once you realize that you kind of have to do that in order to be intellectually valid, legitimate. It's a good motivation. Then, again, your motivation becomes a valid, logical, evidence-based process. But yeah, because the default mode is scary, you know? It's to be –

G: Us, them.

S: Yeah. It's being in our little tribal narrative bubble and to not even be able to see the other side.

G: Confirm, confirm, confirm.

S: Yeah, exactly. You guys, I'm sure, have had – especially over the last year, right? You've had the experience. Of having a conversation with somebody who is so in their bubble, they're unreachable. Unreachable.

E: Absolutely.

B: Completely and utterly.

E: That's right.

G: Well, look, guys, I'm sorry. I just didn't like Rogue One. I just didn't like it, you know? But you're not going to convince me otherwise. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I came across that way.

S: Yeah. The most frustrating thing, which is – I think this is really what tipped over some kind of threshold this past year, is that when you can't even agree upon the basic facts, that's what's frustrating, the most frustrating. I was like, well, listen, here's a reference. This is a fact. We can use this now. This is established. We can use this as a premise. And you're like, no, I reject that fact. I believe this over here. I believe this different set of facts. And I just completely reject your sources. Why? Because they disagree with me. I have my facts over here. So you can't even get off first base now because people have their own reality. It's very, very frustrating. I'm still struggling with how to figure out how to approach that because I seem to be stymied at every turn. Once they've completely ensconced themselves in their own narrative bubble, I don't know how to get through to them because everything you say is – they'll just shrug it off.

E: Yeah. They'll shrug it off and then they'll go seek reinforcement from more like-minded sources and people. Their bubble.

B: Yeah. I mean I was thinking you would – I feel like I need like full documentation evidence from sources that they are kind of – feel OK about and only then would they – only then might it give them pause and probably not. But that's what I feel like I need, this whole – like a whole PowerPoint discussion. Like here, look at what this person says and then look at this video of this person saying this and then look at these sources that you kind of trust and then maybe –

S: But Bob, we know that doesn't work because we've spoken to people. It's like, no, but you could hear them saying it in a video and they literally said, those videos are doctored. So video evidence is not enough. It's not enough. Video evidence – but here he is saying it. Now it's just – right? We're not making that up. That's what people – that's what we're being told.

E: That was edited.

S: All right. We're not going to solve this problem. Let's move on.

Deep Sea Discoveries (1:05:19)

• http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/12/this-deep-sea-fisherman-posts-his-discoveries-on-twitter-and-oh-my-god-kill-it-with-fire/

S: George, this is a fun one that you sent us. Tell us about it.

G: Yeah. So have you ever been in a position where you need nightmare fuel? Have you ever wondered what it might have looked like if H.R. Geiger had worked for Jim Henson? Well, let me tell you. There's an article which is zipping around. There is a gentleman by the name of Roman Fedortsov. He is a Russian fishing trawler fisherman from Murmansk, which is in Russia. This is above Finland, kind of up and to the right of Finland is the city named Murmansk and he goes up into the Barents Sea and he deep sea fishes. He's on a fishing trawler and, of course, he has a Twitter account. So he posts pictures of the creatures that he pulls out of the – what is it? – bathypelagic and abyssopelagic depths, which is like a thousand kilometers down to all the way down to 4,000 kilometers down – meters, sorry, not kilometers, meters down.

S: Yeah, I was going to say that's too far.

G: Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, 4,000 meters. Yeah, a thousand meters and 4,000 meters. The place – light stops around like 200 meters or so and then you're just in the dark and there's these creatures and he brings these things up and he takes pictures of them. And if you've ever wanted to stay awake through the night and just take a look at some of these guys. I mean there is one. It is the alien baby from Alien 4, Resurrection.

E: Oh, yeah.

G: A terrible film.

J: Without a doubt. Without a doubt. What the hell is going on down there?

G: It is just – there is a thing. There's this one creature. Again, it looks like this kind of monstrous – there's one creature that looks like Satan's snake puppet. It sort of has these like little miniature tiny white Christmas trees on its mouth and it just – the eyes are just sort of not only looking into your soul but predicting your death.

J: It's got a doll's eyes.

E: And it looks kind of happy about it, which is very frightening.

G: It's very pleased that it knows the exact hour that you're going to end your time on earth.

S: I found what species that is.

G: Oh, really?

S: Yeah. That's a frilled shark.

G: Is that – oh my god.

B: Which one is that, Steve?

S: The one with the rows of teeth? With the rows of teeth? You might think initially that it looks like an eel but a frilled shark looks very eel like. But the rows of teeth are the giveaway. So yeah, it has this open mouth. Each tooth is actually five teeth in a row. You know how sharks have that conveyor belt of teeth? Yeah, that's a frilled shark.

G: But they're all exposed and they're just laughing at you and laughing at the fact that you will not live very long. There's another one in the palm of his hand here. It looks like a scorpion sort of but it's a scorpion with massive spider legs on it. It's just the creepiest thing. You keep going down and then there's like an angler fish kind of thing. An angler fish that an angler fish would be freaked out by. It's one of those.

E: Evil angler fish.

G: You keep going and then there's like this kind of neoprene black death grasshopper that he's holding onto that's sort of this like fishy, scaly – not scaly but just a slimy black satanic grasshopper which is unbelievable. There's another bunch of these like little slugs. Now, if you saw Peter Jackson's version of King Kong, there's that great sequence where they're attacked by these slugs and it eats the one guy's head. Well, here they are on a train.

S: I think the other thing you were pointing out, the black thing, looks like something that would fall off of Cthulhu basically.

B: Yes.

G: While he's eating, this is kind of what falls out of his mouth while Cthulhu – or maybe you're fighting it and you think you're getting points because you're knocking chunks of Cthulhu off of his own face and it's ending up in this guy's basket. There's like a blue crab kind of thing. But it's like a starfish but it's a star that's about to explode and destroy your planet. It's that kind of a starfish.

S: That's a sea star. It's a nine-armed sea star, yeah.

G: Nine-armed sea star.

J: Why nine arms? Why nine?

G: Because cats have nine lives and he wants to make sure that every life will be gone. That's pretty much I think what's going on. There's another little thing here. It looks like a bicycle part off of like Gaudi's – what's that cathedral? The Sagrada Família, right? In Barcelona. It's like something taken off of Gaudi's bicycle. I mean there's another thing – it's unbelievable the things that he's pulling out of the depths of the ocean and it amazes me. Oh, this is another one. It's like a combination orange banana and cow tongue.

E: Is that a sea cucumber or something?

G: Yeah, I think that's a sea cucumber, isn't it? I guess.

S: Or related to it. It looks similar.

G: Yeah. Whatever salad that's ending up into, I have nothing – anything to do with. It's just – they are just so – there's like a bit of a stingray sort of looking thing too with its gaping mouth laughing at you. Just amazing. And the thing that struck me is like if you were to see any of these creatures in a science fiction film, it would kind of be like, come on. Like, please. Like, that's it, right?

E: That could never exist.

B: Guys, I love the one that's – it's 13 from the bottom. There's two of them. It looks like it puked up its own mouth. And then its eyeballs, completely detached, flipped around and then attached themselves again. That's what that looks like.

E: That's a good description of that horror show.

G: So those things exist and are living some kind of viable life in the depths of the darkness of the deepest sections of the oceans of our planet.

B: For eons.

G: For eaons.

E: Oh, gosh.

G: And it's like, what the hell else is down – that's the first thing I think when I see these pictures. What the hell else is down there?

S: George, just Google weird deep sea creatures.

G: There you go.

S: These – the things that you're looking at aren't even the weirdest things down there.

B: Oh, I find that [inaudible].

J: And George, I got one more thing to tell you.

G: Yeah.

J: Every one of them hate you.

G: I know. I can feel it. I can feel their hate and I'm not going to sleep until March because I just – I'm going to – you know –

B: And these are all documented and known what the – these things are? It's known?

G: Yeah. He's sort of – he tweets in Russian and he's sort of – he's asking people what are some of these things.

E: Oh, gosh.

G: And some people are responding. So it's just – yeah, they're oddly beautiful and frightening and it just shows you how varied and how little we actually know in terms of some of the fauna that's on our planet. It's–

S: George.

G: -unbelievable.

S: Google blobfish.

J: Or don't.

G: Oh, is that the big-faced guy, right?

S: Yeah.

G: It's like the sad – yeah. I know.

S: The big nose.

B: Oh, they're awesome.

S: There's the fish with the transparent head and his eyes are inside his head.

Who's That Noisy (1:12:54)

• Answer to last week: Monkey

S: All right, Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.

J: Who's that noisy? Right. So welcome 2017. Here we go. So last year in December, listener Darren from California sent in this noisy. [plays Noisy]

S: George, what's that saying?

G: Will you marry me?

S: Yeah.

J: Right. This is strange. This is Cara's first marriage proposal.

E: I love this.

J: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

E: But not the last.

J: This is really cool.

G: It was from one of the deep-sea creatures, wasn't it?

E: Yeah. Right?

J: Right?

E: Oh, my gosh.

J: So this is a recording of a simulation of what a macaque would – that's a monkey – would sound like if it spoke English. Now, the reason why monkeys can't actually talk is what? Bob, quick. What's the answer?

S: Their hyoid bone is too high in their –

B: Yeah, their whole throat's not conducive to speech.

E: Hyoid.

J: And many of us think this, but I have found this to be false. So watch skepticism in action. Minds are being changed with what I'm about to say. Yeah, so what they found out was there isn't an anatomical reason why they can't speak. They found out that it's that they don't have the brainpower for language. So there's differences in the brain structure, and it suggests that human speech came from a unique evolution, and they just didn't evolve to have those centers in the brain to do this, and that it isn't the anatomy that's stopping them. Whoa, that's pretty cool.

E: But that's a computer simulation?

J: Yeah, it has to be. I don't think it's a guy going, you know what I mean? I think it's…

E: Andy Serkis in one of his roles.

J: No, George. I know George can do that right now, just like me. All right, so that was interesting. So check this out. So thank you, Darren, for sending that in. A lot of people responded to this. I guess a lot of people read about it because it came up as a news item. Very cool. The winner from last week was Sarah Walling, and she said, it's a primate. And she couldn't remember the exact details, but she did guess what it was. So thank you very much for sending that in. A notable mention is one of our listeners named Carl said that, that sounds like an artificial dog larynx if a dog can talk. And I thought, that's a really cool idea. I would love it if some of my past dogs could talk. But no, unfortunately, that wasn't it, right? This is great. Being pet is great. Eating is great. So we have a new noisy this week. This one was sent in by a listener named Ian Hollis. And here it is. [plays Noisy] Now, do I have to say it, listeners? Do I have to say what I'm about to say? I guess I do.

B: Yes, you do.

J: Do not email me and say it's somebody whistling. Don't say that.

E: It's not hard for marks.

J: That's your clue. That's your clue. Okay. But don't, please don't do that. And if you're going to send me an email to who's that noisy, you have to email me to WTN@theskepticsguide.org. A lot of people are sending the wrong addresses. Go, please use wtn at the skeptics guide.org. And those emails go directly to me. And on top of that, if you heard any really cool noisies over the past couple of weeks, Christmas noisies are cool. They're still relevant. Send them to me. I want to hear them. And if you get lucky, it might end up on the show. Thanks.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay. Well, guys, it's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:16:36)

Item #1: In 1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb, 43 years before Thomas Edison began work on his bulb. Item #2: Both the Franklin Stove and bifocals were not original to Benjamin Franklin, but French inventions he popularized in America. Item #3: Ernest Duchesne presented for his PhD thesis in 1897 his research finding that Penicillium molds produced a substance which killed bacteria and could be used to treat bacterial infections, 31 years prior to Alexander Fleming’s discovery.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. And we have a theme this week. Would you guys like to hear the theme?

J: Yes.

E: Yes, please.

S: The theme, not the theme to Star Trek. The theme is inventors.

J: All right. Pretty cool.

S: These are people.

G: Let's do it.

S: That you think invented things, but maybe they didn't invent the things you think that they invented.

J: Bastards. They're bastards.

S: All righty. Okay.

E: There are only three of them.

G: Someone should write a song about that.

S: Only... That's right. Here we go. This is for you, George. Item number one. In 18... But these are specific. So these are specific details. In 1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb 43 years before Thomas Edison began work on his bulb. Item number two. Both the Franklin stove and bifocals were not original to Benjamin Franklin, but French inventions he popularized in America. And item number three. Ernest Duchesne presented for his PhD thesis in 1897, his research finding that penicillium molds produced a substance which killed bacteria and could be used to treat bacterial infections 31 years prior to Alexander Fleming's discovery.

G: So I'm first?

S: No.

G: No?

S: No.

J: I thought the guest always goes first.

S: No, not always. It's at my discretion.

J: What the f**k?

S: I'm the king of science or fiction, Jay. You should know that by now.

J: Well, I'm just saying. I'm just following the pattern, Steve.

S: Good. Then you go first.

J: I'm sorry.

S: Don't tell me he was going first.

J: He was only 16. All right. 1835. James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb. Stupid things pop into mind. Like...

G: Focus, Jay. Focus.

J: But listen to this. I'm going to say something that all of you are thinking, and I have the balls to say. Did electricity exist? Not electricity, but did power exist?

S: Power.

J: Converters and circuits.

G: You're so brave, Jay. You're so brave. You're a hero.

J: 1835.

G: Sure.

J: That's a long time ago. Very, very long time. I would say, yes, that these types of things did exist in some way or shape or form. But 43 years before Thomas Edison began work on the bulb. Wow. All right. So second item here. Both the Franklin stove and the bifocals were not original to Benjamin Franklin, but French inventions he popularized in America. All right. Now, I believe that one because I know that he went to France. I know that he spent a lot of time in France. So that one is on my likely list. Last one. Ernest Duchesne presented for his PhD thesis in 1897. His research finding that penicillin molds produced a substance which killed bacteria and could be used to treat bacterial infections 31 years prior. Whoa. All right. So you're saying that one of these is false, right, Steve?

S: That's correct.

G: 600!

E: That's right. 600.

S: All right. So I'm going to get rid of the one about the Franklin stove. Now, where did this guy... All right. I'm going to say it was the light bulb that was the fake. Okay, Bob.

B: Did you say Bob?

S: Yeah.

B: All right.

S: Bob, you got to redeem yourself. You had a bad year. 2016 was very bad. That's a clean slate.

B: I actually did mean to predict that this year. I'm kicking all butts.

E: Echo.

B: But I'm going to say...

J: Kicking all butts. Not some. All. All butts.

B: All butts.

E: All butts are off.

B: The Benjamin Franklin one, yeah, it makes sense. And that probably means that it's false. But I'm going to say that that's true. The bacteria one, damn, man. 31 years. And this doesn't sound like an obscure scientist in some country in a different language. And it's for his PhD thesis. So this one's going to be tough to say that it's science. But the first one, the incandescent light bulb, really irks me. Because I know what Edison went through. I mean, he went through, what, hundreds of substances looking for just the right substance to use as a filament. It was so hard. And I just don't think necessarily that this other guy would have gone through the process. Now, of course, the answer to that could be he did find something that worked OK, but not great. And that wasn't really viable. But it was good as a proof of concept. And that's probably going to come back and bite me in the ass. But I'm going to say that one is a fiction, incandescent light bulb.

S: OK, Evan?

E: Oh, so concerning the light bulb, Jay, I think to answer your question about the electricity part of this is that if memory serves, you were able to generate something, I think, just using a hand crank. And it was very localized, right? So you turn it around. You sort of generate a current.

S: You could crank that stuff out.

E: In a local sense. So you wouldn't need an infrastructure kind of thing to necessarily make something like this work. I have a feeling this one's science. And I think Edison took 2,000 shots at the light bulb before he got it right. I know that there were many attempts in the 19th century for bulbs, similar devices. And I just have a feeling this one's going to turn out to be right. The Franklin Stove one, bifocals, yeah, I think that one's right. That only leaves me this other one, which I've never heard before about Ernest Duchesne. So the process of elimination tells me that I have to call that one fiction.

S: OK, and George, you get to go last.

G: Now, I'm from West Orange, New Jersey, originally. And West Orange, New Jersey is known for many things. First of all, producing the guy that produces the Geologic podcast. That's the number one thing. But the number two thing is the fact that the Edison plant, Edison's laboratory, one of his early laboratories is in West Orange, which I used to go to all the time as a kid. And I know that Edison, yes, I think it was over thousands, thousands of items he experimented with. And the problem wasn't getting something to incandesce. The problem was getting something that would stay incandescent, and was cheap, and was affordable, and wouldn't wear out. So I know that there were plenty of guys that had invented and had worked on this problem. So I would say the first one with the light bulb is absolute, is true, is science. The Franklin stove thing, yeah, definitely. I think that was Ben's modus operandi, was to kind of take the work of others and claim it as his own, because he is an American. Perhaps the first true American, some would even say. The third one, the penicillium molds, that feels very, very shaky and snaky to me. So I'm going to say that Mr. Duchesne is the fiction, and his penicillium molds.

S: So is it Bob and Jay with the bulbs, and Evan and George with the penicillium? Did I get that correct?

J: I think it is.

E: That's right.

J: That is correct.

E: If it turns out to be Ben Franklin, I'm going to do something.

S: So you all agree on number two, so we'll start there. Both the Franklin stove and bifocals were not original to Benjamin Franklin, but French inventions he popularized in America. You all think this one is science, and this one is the first sweep of 2017.

B: You suck. I called it. I called it.

E: You got us with Ben Franklin. That's just...

S: Ben Franklin absolutely invented the Franklin stove and bifocals.

E: Oh, it's one of my favorites.

J: Damn it. God damn it.

S: I know, but it was just... It was so plausible.

G: Fake news, fake news. This is fake news. Steve, this is fake news. I'm not buying it. I'm not buying it.

S: Yeah, that's right.

B: Fake news.

G: What's your source? What's your source? What's your source?

S: Benjamin Franklin was an actual genius. Yeah, the whole French thing just made it very plausible, so I was hoping you guys would go for that. Every reference says he was the first one to figure out that you could cut the two glasses in half and put them together and boom. Because as he got older, he needed both reading glasses and glasses for seeing far, and he was just having to swap out the glasses over and over again. It was just a pain in the ass. So he put them together, and he gets credit for that. So yeah, he didn't steal these from the French. But not that that's implausible. That's what... It was very, very plausible. Okay, let's go back to number one. In 1835, James Bowman Lindsay demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb 43 years before Thomas Edison began work on his bulb. That one is science, and man, the history of the incandescent light bulb is so long and complicated.

B: Really?

S: What's interesting is that Edison had very little to do with it.

B: What?

S: How little he actually had to do with the incremental advances of the bulb. Let me give you a quick little history of the incandescent light bulb. The first incandescent filament was actually even before that, but it wasn't a bulb, right? So that's why I had to say bulb. There were a couple other people who did that. Ebenezer, gotta love Ebenezer. 1761, Ebenezer Kinserly demonstrated heating a wire to incandescence. So the basic concept that if you heated a wire, it would incandesce was demonstrated in 1761. Then in 1802, Humphrey Davy used a battery, Jay, because there wasn't an infrastructure of electricity, used a battery of immense size consisting of 2000 cells housed in the basement of the Royal Institution of Great Britain to create an incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum. He used platinum because it has a very high melting point. But of course, using a lot of platinum in a light bulb is not exactly very practical.

G: He used a BOIS? I thought those didn't exist.

S: What's that?

G: A BOIS? The batteries of immense size?

S: No, batteries of immense size.

G: I thought they didn't exist.

B: Nice, nice.

S: In 1835, Lindsay was the first one to demonstrate a bulb. Now, but Bob, you hit it. These bulbs were crappy. They were crappiola.

B: Yes, yeah.

S: They would burn out in hours or they wouldn't produce enough light to really be functional. But then multiple other people over the next 30, 40 years incremented it. They figured out how to put a vacuum in the bulb and that that would make the filament last longer and then how to make the vacuum better. And then they were also experimenting with different filaments. They hit upon carbon filaments long before Edison did. Every element was put into place by other people before Edison.

B: So he just leaped in at the last moment, put it all together. And like, yeah, here you go. And took all the credit, took all the credit. Nice.

S: Not even that. Not even that. The guy who put it all together before he did was Joseph Swan. Have you ever heard that name?

B: Nope.

E: I have, yes.

S: Joseph Swan was a British guy who came up with the carbon filament vacuum light bulb that worked. That was that was market ready, right? That was that worked well enough, lasted long enough that it would actually something that could be marketable. Then in America, Edison did it. And then Swan sued Edison successfully. And so Edison basically partnered with Swan so that he could have access to his patents. And then he bought out Swan's interest in the company and essentially just inserted his name into the inventor of the light bulb. Not that he wasn't working on it. He was working on it, but he basically violated Swan's patent and then bought it out. And in any case, at that point, all the individual components of the bulb were there. And yeah, he did tweak it. At most, you could say he tweaked it.

G: He put the name Edison on it.

S: Yeah, exactly. The bottom line is he did not invent the incandescent light bulb.

E: Nope.

S: No part of it. No, he did not even increment in any significant part. I mean, I think he what he was what he settled on was he did experiment with a lot of different filaments. Yes. And he settled on a bamboo carbon filament made from bamboo was what he ultimately settled on. But of course, the light bulb continued to progress. Since then, they figured out that putting in, tungsten was the big that was the big breakthrough was tungsten, because that then burned a lot brighter and long. Well, not longer, but much brighter than the carbon filaments. And then they figured it was it was better to put in a non reactive gas, like argon, or nitrogen even than a vacuum. So vacuums were were good, but they were better than air because the idea was to make the filament last long. They also had to prevent the blacking of the inside of the bulb. And what worked best was the non reactive gases like argon. So that was another increment. Then they learned, they figured out how to frost the inside of the bulbs. And then basically, at that point, you're at the modern bulb that we would recognize, you know, the tungsten filament gas filled bulbs that are frosted.

E: So we're going through with batteries, they're going through with bulbs.

S: Yeah, right, right, right, right. But over a longer period of time. But yeah, I mean, to boil all that entire history and all the people who incremented it to say that Edison invented the light bulb is is wrong.

B: It's criminal.

S: It's so inaccurate to be wrong. Isn't that amazing? And he actually bought out the guy who really brought it to the market first. Yeah, but the Swan Edison bulb, they just sort of this often referred to as the Swan Edison bulb, because they maybe you could say at best, you could say they they both independently invented it. But Swan had the patent. So Edison had to buy him out. But the Swan Edison bulb was was the first one that was market ready. It was the first one that had the brightness and the longevity to be commercially viable. And not for nothing. It was also the bulb took off because of electrification, right? Because of Tesla's alternating current, right?

E: Yeah, direct current, alternating current.

S: Yeah, the Tesla Edison AC versus DC thing, because so it was the combination of, yeah, once now that everything's being electrified, having bulbs is a huge advantage prior to the availability of electricity. Not so much. Very interesting.

J: I was right.

S: Yes, you were. You were right in that aspect of it, Jay. Yes. Let's move on to the third one. Ernest Duchenne presented for his PhD thesis in 1897. His research finding that penicillium molds produced a substance which killed bacteria and could be used to treat bacterial infections 31 years prior to Alexander Fleming's discovery. That is science. This guy figured out that when molds grow on bacterial plates, that they would fight with each other, that just like bacteria produce toxins, and maybe the molds are producing some kind of toxin that's fighting off the bacteria. And he experimented with it by giving the molds to animals that he had infected with the bacteria, guinea pigs, literal guinea pigs. And the ones that got the penicillium glaucum mold survived, and the ones that didn't succumb to the bacterial infection. And that was his PhD thesis. His work was simply forgotten and had to be rediscovered by Fleming.

B: That is horrible. That is tragic.

S: Yeah, but not only that—

B: How many lives were lost?

S: Fleming himself did not appreciate the significance at the time of his discovery, and that was left to other researchers to purify penicillin and to produce it as an antibiotic. So Fleming didn't do that either. He didn't really invent penicillin, the drug. He just made the discovery about the penicillium mold and then did nothing with it, really.

B: Oh, my God. How could you not see?

G: What else is lost out there, do you think? What other things have been worked on that are one step removed from some massive beneficial thing? You know what I mean? How many Duchesnes are there out there that haven't been found or been rediscovered by someone like Fleming or whatever? It makes you just—

S: Right. I know. There's so much.

G: It freaks you out.

S: Yeah, there's so much.

G: Especially now. Even like— Are people inventing stuff now that's being overlooked because the inventor doesn't necessarily have the vision to say, oh, wait a minute. If we just put this dongle on this thing or if we just apply it here, it could totally transfix whatever. Quantum computing or whatever.

S: So just to complete the story, so 1928 is when Fleming made his discovery and then it was 10 years later, 1938, when Flory began his work to try to purify it, the penicillin. And then once they were able to do that, the problem was that the penicillin mold made very little of it. You would need something like 2,000 liters of it to make enough to treat one patient. But then you know what they did? They said they used the genetic modification technology of the time. They irradiated the penicillin mold. They did mutation. They used radiation to induce mutations until they created a mutated mold that had a thousand fold increase in the amount of penicillin it created.

E: Unnatural.

S: Yeah. X-rays.

B: That's awesome. That's awesome.

G: Super cool. Wow. Nicely done, Steve.

J: Yeah, that was a fun one.

S: That was a fun one.

G: You got it.

B: Oh yeah, I could tell you were extra giddy.

G: My favorite Ben Franklin story is he would walk around. He had a special cane that had a hollow point tip on it. And at the point of the cane, he had vegetable oil. And he would walk over to small ponds and small lakes that had little amounts of waves on them. And he would say, calm, calm lake. And he would stick the tip of his cane in and he would inject the oil. And the oil would break the surface tension and the lake would calm down. And he would freak everybody out.

S: Science.

G: So cool.

E: I hope he explained it that way.

G: I don't know if he ever explained it.

B: Good old low viscosity oil.

G: Yeah. He was like the first punked guy. It was great.

E: He was the first of so many things.

G: Yeah.

S: Yeah. But essentially, I could probably do a dozen of these science or fictions. Because what typically happens is that you have this long story of incremental advances. And then it crosses over some threshold. And then one famous person takes credit for inventing the thing. And everyone who contributed to it incrementally along the way gets lost to history. Because we like these simple narratives of Edison laboring away, experimenting with 2,000 filaments until he invents the incandescent light bulb out of whole cloth. And it's a complete fiction. That's not what happened.

G: You ever watch the James Burke? He has that great show, Connections.

S: Love it.

G: It's so good. The web of invention. It's not linear. It's this makes this, which makes this, which makes this, which makes this. And it's such a different way to look at history.

S: I love it. Yeah. Connections. And then his sequel to that was The Day the Universe Changed. Have you seen that one, George?

G: Oh, my. Fantastic.

S: Excellent.

G: Very, very good. I got the book version of that too. It's just so great.

J: What happened that day?

S: It's the idea is that when our vision of the universe changes for us, the universe literally changes. So like if you think, yeah, whatever, like the sun is the center of the universe, then in your mind, the sun is the center of the universe. And then we discover that it's not, then it isn't. You know, so in terms of our internal model of the universe changes when we make scientific discoveries, which is an interesting way to think about it. But the connections, yeah, the connections is fascinating. I haven't watched it in a while. I have to watch it again.

G: It's really good.

S: I'd like to see. Yeah. So it's just the way that, oh, yeah, because they needed to scrape the barnacles off the ship. So they invented this and then that led to billiard balls or whatever, you know, like these tenuous.

G: Air conditioning came about because of malaria. In essence, they were trying to figure out how to deal with malaria. So, oh, well, because it's the bad air, mal air, you know. Oh, so we got to like somehow cool the air off. If you cool if you like affect the air, we cool it off. And then eventually you get air conditioning. But it's not, oh, we need to be in a cooler room. It's always these weird tenuous, but they could only do that because this other guy had realized that if you use paint thinner, you can make this kind of thing. You couldn't do that until some other guy realized that ping pong balls were needed to make it's like, you just, there's so many steps that have to be involved.

S: It's so cool.

G: But it's never, it's never linear. It's never linear.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:20)

'We (skeptics) want to teach kids that it's through science the true wonder and beauty of nature can be revealed. But it's vital they learn how we all can be fooled and tricked. That's where a skeptical approach comes in. Teaching kids not to always believe everything they are told and teaching them how to put claims to the test.' - Richard Saunders, The Skeptic Zone Podcast

S: Evan, what did you pick for the first quote of 2017?

E: The first quote of 2017 is by a fellow that we all know and very much admire. Some might say love. "We skeptics want to teach kids that it's through science, the true wonder and beauty of nature can be revealed, but it's vital. They learn how we can all be fooled and tricked. That's where a skeptical approach comes in. Teaching kids not always to believe everything they are told and teaching them how to put claims to the test." And that was from an interview I read with Richard Saunders from the Skeptic Zone podcast.

S: Richard.

E: Richard. And what I want to do for 2017, not necessarily shake up the quote segment, but give it a little bit of perhaps more focus is that I'm going to be using a lot of quotes from skeptics that we are both familiar with and perhaps unfamiliar with, but definitely people among our community and some, a lot of quotes that you have not either read before seen elsewhere. And I want to give a little more exposure to the people in our community through the quote. So that's what's going to be happening in 2017. If you have any suggestions as to whom you would like me to do some researching for some quotes, please send them along INFO@theskepticsguide.org.

S: Thank you, Evan. Yeah, that's cool.

E: Thank you.

S: That should be fun.

E: It will be.

Geologic Podcast Discussion (1:40:42)

S: So George, we're really looking forward to your 500th episode live streaming extravaganza, skeptical, musical, geologic, whatever thing, magic event that's happening.

G: That's exactly, that's what the poster is going to say. That's exactly what the, that's the tagline. It's perfect. Yes. February 25th. I'm so excited. Yeah. Thank you for helping me out.

S: Our pleasure.

G: And thank you for sort of showing how it's done guys. You've been, you've been quite the beacon for us other podcasters that-

S: Trailblazers. We like to think of ourselfs as trailblazers.

G: Trailblazers, yes. And I'm just, I'm there to, I'm there to take the branch in the face as you walk past. Yes.

B: No, I kind of like the, I kind of like the metaphor beacons in the gloom, perhaps.

E: Candle in the dark.

B: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

E: That's very nice. Thank you, George.

S: It's a lamp in the fog.

G: A spark in the gas oven.

B: Oh, nice. I like that one. I'm just curious. What are we going to do in 66 episodes? It's gotta be something special.

E: Oh, it'll be special. All right.

B: Come on.

S: Yeah, that's right.

G: It's all backwards. Steve Nolte is a genius. Do your homework, drink milk, drink milk, do your homework, do your homework.

J: Brush your teeth.

G: Listen to your parents, listen to your parents.

S: You're a little too good at that, George.

G: An entire backwards show.

E: Yeah, it's like you've done this before.

S: No, no, no, we do it remember the Twin Peaks where they spoke backwards and then played it backwards?

E: Bizarre.

S: So we have to record an entire episode backwards and then play it so that it sounds...

G: You learn it phonetically forwards and then you have backwards and everything.

J: Nah.

G: I'll do that two years later. Don't worry about it. I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it for you guys a couple years later.

J: George, one last thing. One of my favorite things 2016 was when you did one of our shows with your characters.

G: Yes.

S: Oh, that was hilarious.

G: The April 1st episode of 2016.

B: Yeah, that was great.

S: Did we talk about that on our show? I don't know if we did, but that was so much fun. So what George did, listen to the episode, but he basically did an entire episode of the SGU. He did the dialogue, but with his characters from the Geologic podcast. So it was obviously no one else other than us can have this experience, but I'm listening to the show and I'm thinking, God, this dialogue sounds awfully familiar.

B: Yes, yes.

E: I know.

S: Then it dawned on me, it's like, oh, he's doing... First of all, my first thought was that you're pretending you're doing a show like the SGU. Then I realized, no, he's doing an actual... Because then I started recognizing...

G: The transcript, yeah.

S: Yeah, he's doing the transcript of an episode. Then I'm like, I wondered how long you were going to keep it up. But of course...

G: There's no way he's going to do 45 minutes.

S: Yeah, but you did the whole episode.

E: It was classic. That was a wonderful episode.

S: It was Bizarro World, because I'm listening to things that we said, but I'm listening to other people say them. And it was as close as I guess that I could come to listening to one of my own episodes. You know, because it wasn't us. And I remember thinking, God, these guys are smart.

G: Well, it's like, it's that thing of the artist can never really experience the art the way that a viewer can or a listener can. Like Pink Floyd can never hear Dark Side of the Moon. They just can't because they were involved in every incremental aspect of it, unless there's some massive brain injury. So I thought, wouldn't it be fun for you guys to maybe just get a slight appreciation of how good your show actually is, but just having my guys do it and yeah, give you a sort of sense. And it was just, it was fun to figure out who was going to be who. Okay. So, well, Steve's got to be the Russian patriarch character, because he's got to be that guy. So yeah. So I'm glad it came across the right way.

S: It was fun.

G: You guys enjoyed it.

S: My favorite matchup was Bob.

B: Was it really?

S: Yeah. I can't remember. He was...

G: Oh yeah, Rupert McClanahan.

S: Rupert McClanahan. Because...

G: No, it's great. It's cosmic rays. You don't understand. It's so great. Yeah.

J: Was that bullshit? The best matchup was me being Mortimer.

S: You being Mortimer was obvious.

E: You have a Mortimer fetish.

S: Jay, the thing is, when Bob got into his exasperated mode, the Bob's exasperation with a Scottish accent was just perfect.

B: I gotta listen to that again.

J: I have contemplated paying George to do another episode, just so I could hear it.

G: All right. Well, maybe 666. We'll figure that out. That'll be perfect.

S: Thank you all for joining me this week.

E: Thanks, Steve.

B: Shirley.

G: Thanks, Steve.

S: George, thanks as always for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show.

E: Thanks, George.

G: Likewise. Thanks for having me. Congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations.

E: Thank you, George.

S: You too, George. Congratulations on hitting 500. We look forward to seeing your live show and helping you with that. And everyone, until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.

References