SGU Episode 828

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SGU Episode 828
May 22nd 2021
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 827                      SGU 829
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
If each of us communicate science to our favorite adjacent audience, we can bring science into everything, because at the end of the day, everything is adjacent to science.
Pamela Gay
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Introduction

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 19^th, 2021, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: What's up?

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, folks.

S: Cara's feeling a little under the weather, so she won't be joining us this evening. So it's just the boys. The boys.

E: Yes.

J: I don't remember the last time we didn't do a show with Cara. We don't know how long has it been.

S: It's been a while.

C: Yeah.

J: I mean, we do the live streams without her because she's got to work.

S: But she carves out Wednesday night to do the show, but she's just sick today. She's not really feeling well. And unfortunately, didn't give us any notice to have a guest rogue. So it's just us for tonight.

J: Well, I have something interesting to tell you guys.

S: Sure.

E: Yes.

J: When was it? Well, it's been over the past five, six days that we could see people if you're vaccinated. And I caught my first cold.

E: Oh, no.

J: Yes.

B: Oh, my gosh.

E: I almost forgot what it's like to have a cold.

J: It's definitely a cold. It's super light. It's just a sinus.

S: I haven't been sick in a year and a half.

J: Yep.

B: You puny moron.

E: And I'm usually good for at least one cold a year, maybe two.

B: Maybe a couple of decades.

J: But it was funny because I'm just like, oh, my God. I caught a legit cold from somebody. It's right there. As soon as you interact with people, you're going to catch something from somebody.

S: Yeah, probably. I mean, I usually get a few colds a year because I'm in the hospital having thousands of sick people filed by me every year. So plus I have children in school. That's always the... It's probably where you got it from, Jay, to be honest with you. That's the most likely source of exposure for parents.

E: Here's your vector.

S: My younger daughter graduating high school this year, so I won't have children.

E: Wow.

S: Yeah. It'll be the first time in a while that I won't have someone living in the house who's going to school.

E: My gosh.

S: I know, right? So I'm sure everyone's heard about the CDC. Speaking of which, Jay, the CDC's new guidelines on wearing masks and that if you're vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask or social distance anymore, except for certain situations like high risk or on the subway, like really, really super crowded areas. So not unreasonable. It's always... Everyone says, is this based on science? Well, no. It can't be completely based on science because science will only tell you what the risk is. It can't tell you what risk you're willing to take. That's a judgment call.

B: Yeah. That's a good point.

S: It's not like, here is the one science-based policy. It's no, science informs the policy and then we collectively decide what risks you're willing to take for what benefit or what inconvenience we're willing to put up with in order to reduce our risk. Right? Which we all do. We all make this decision all the time. We put our seatbelt on, even if it's a pain in the ass because of the increased safety or we wear a helmet or we drive the speed limit or whatever. We don't eat that food that's expired, whatever. We make these risk-benefit judgments all the time and wearing a mask and social distancing is just one more of them. But the science tells us what those risks are, what the benefits are, what procedures will reduce that risk. So anyway, I just get a little annoyed when people, if this is based on science or this is not based on science, come on, let's put it into perspective. So is there a political angle to the CDC's recommendations? Of course there is. I mean, that's the point. You're making some kind of judgment call. But what's interesting is, and this is another sort of political judgment call, is given that the risk now is lower because a lot about half of the country has at least one dose of vaccine, are we okay basically trusting each other? So in other words, we're doing this on the honor system. There isn't any mechanism to require proof of vaccination or anything like that. So at least publicly, individual businesses could do whatever they want and it still remains to be seen how that's going to pan out. But what do you guys think about that, doing sort of the honor system, given the history of how politicized mask wearing has been?

J: Absolutely not. You know, trust people I don't know.

B: Yeah, I flat out don't trust a lot of people.

J: That's insane. It's such an easy thing to lie about and unfortunately, in my opinion, the kind of people that are choosing not to get vaccinated and the following, the line of reasoning that they're following, they have bad judgment and they're the exact people I would expect to lie about this.

S: I agree. I have to say, having had conversations, even if they were one-way conversations like patients talk to me and I just smile and nod if it's about something that's not medicine, you know. The kind of opinions that people have who do not want to wear a mask, even when it was a good idea, are probably, I agree. I would not trust them to be honest about not being vaccinated.

B: But the thing is, though, with that is that the direct harm can come to them. If you're vaccinated, it's not really going to be that much more of an increased risk for you. It's a much more, it's a much greater increased risk for them. But then you factor in the more longer term the whole idea of like, if they're going around unmasked now, then it increases the chances of a bad, really bad variants coming out.

S: It also prolongs the pandemic, it prolongs the economic impact of the pandemic. So there are societal effects that go beyond any one person. It also affects whether or not we get to herd immunity, which of course impacts everybody because it impacts the pandemic. So it is, it's not just about the individual. And the other thing is, yes, if you're vaccinated, your risk is very reduced, but it's not 100%. It's 90 to 95%, which like 95% sounds great. And it is, but it still means that if you got exposed in such a way that you would, unvaccinated that you would catch the disease, there's still a one in 20 chance that you're going to catch it. You know, that's one way to look at it.

B: Wait, wait, Steve. But I think that's the incorrect way.

S: No, no. I said, I said, if you got exposed, and you would have caught the disease had you not been vaccinated, but you are vaccinated, that means you have only a 5% chance of catching the disease. What you're talking about is, if you go as well, just your overall chance of catching the disease isn't 5% because it's not 100% unvaccinated. I'm just using the hypothetical situation where it was 100% that you would have caught the disease.

B: Okay.

S: Knocks that down by 95%. I was very careful in my example. But you're right. People sometimes misinterpret that as like, oh, you have a 5% chance of getting COVID if you're unvaccinated. No, you have a 5% of the 1% chance you had of getting COVID or whatever it was at baseline.

B: That's a good way to say it. Yeah.

S: But anyway, the bottom line is, it doesn't mean your risk is zero. It doesn't mean that the people who are unvaccinated and unmasked and lying about it, these hypothetical people who might do that, it doesn't mean that they pose zero risk to other people to the vaccinated, just a greatly reduced risk. And so if you are vaccinated, you could decide for yourself how much trust you're willing to put in other people and how much risk you're willing to take. And in what situations. I mean, for me, I mean, I I work in a healthcare setting, and we're still masking in a healthcare setting. So it doesn't affect my work, because that's still the recommendation in a healthcare setting to wear a mask. That's probably not going to change anytime soon. But you know, out in the public, I'm fine not wearing a mask. But yeah, if I were going to go into a situation where I knew I was getting exposed to a lot of strangers in close quarters, I probably would wear a mask.

B: You know, I think that, first of all, the risk of variance is so important. I mean, we could potentially get a variant that basically means that you're essentially not vaccinated anymore. You got to go through this whole thing again. So there's that. So because of that, and because and also the fact that you want to reach herd immunity, that's like the holy grail, let's get to herd immunity. And because of those two things, I think it makes sense, given those two things, that there should be, that we should have a system where you could prove it. And if you can't or won't prove it, then you can't do certain things.

S: Yeah, not everything, but there might be certain things.

B: Not everything, but certain things that, like, and I don't know what they would be, but there would be, I think the people who don't refuse to get vaccinated should feel it. They should be like, damn, I really want to see that movie or I want to take that flight, but I can't because I'm not vaccinated. And then just to impel them, to compel them in whatever way we can in a way that's not like too restrictive or like, whoa, what are you doing there? You can't really prevent people from doing that type of thing. But kind of make them think like, well, what the hell especially for the people that are kind of like on the fence, not the diehards, because they're probably never going to get vaccinated.

E: I suggested a while ago that they tie this to tax credits, give people effectively, money off on their taxes or refunds of some sort.

B: That's an awesome idea. I love that idea, Evan. That's great.

E: Yeah, taxes definitely influence behavior. No doubt about it.

S: Yeah, it's the carrot or the stick kind of debate. And so far we've chosen the carrot approach. What was that?Was that Ohio? Was that the state? It was like, yeah, five people who get vaccinated are going to get a million bucks. That's one way to do it.

E: Yeah. That is some incentive.

J: It's better than nothing.

E: Well, every bit helps.

S: It's probably cost effective, if you think about it from a public health point of view.

E: Oh, sure.

S: You know, if you could spend five million, if you said, hey, would you spend five million dollars to increase the state's vaccine uptake by 10 percent or 20 percent, they would probably say, sure.

E: No brainer.

S: Yeah.

B: You could probably calculate hard numbers of what that would actually save in health care costs. You could put a number on it that would be that could be would be well above that, I would guess.

S: Also, not just health care costs, it's lost lost economic opportunity as well. You have to include that. I mean the impact of the pandemic has been massive.

E: Right. More people who get sick, they're not working and their earning potential goes down. The family income goes down. It has wide. It's pretty widespread effects.

S: Yeah. I mean, there are some businesses that just could not function in the pandemic. And like, how do you survive a whole year without the ability to do your to to run your business? It's amazing. All right.

News Items

Butt Breathing (10:53)

• Scientists say mammals can breathe through their butts in emergencies

S: Jay, let's start with some news items. Tell me about animals breathing through their butt.

E: Did I hear you correctly?

S: Yes, you did.

E: OK.

J: Yeah. So I had to do this news item because it's exactly one of those news items that you would think came from the onion, especially if you're just reading the headline. You know, I got kind of pulled in because I'm like, what is this? Can this possibly be true? And it turns out that it is legitimate. So scientists have demonstrated anal respiration using pigs and rodents. It's real and it's coming to your town. So the real deal is that mammals can absorb oxygen in their anus because the mammalian rectum has a ton of fine blood vessels under the surface of the rectal lining. So this means that mammals can also absorb drugs, alcohol, caffeine. You guys have heard this, right? You know, people have actually died from from absorbing alcohol in their rectum. They OD on it because they don't they don't have like the-

B: I've heard of that.

J: ou know, when you drink, you have there's more of a feedback loop when you drink it because you're used to drinking, but you're not used to doing this.

S: So it actually gets absorbed faster, Jay. That's the main reason. So there are some medications that we give by that route. It's called PR per rectum. So let's say you go into the emergency room and you're unconscious and we need or you're having a seizure and we need to get medication to you right away. You can give it intravenously or you can give it PR or you give it you put down an NG tube and put it directly into their stomach. But PR is a very fast, very fast administration route because it's so vascular.

J: It's crazy. I know you just think it's the dirty place. Don't do anything down there. But it's another – it's just biology and it's useful. So let me give you some more details on this. So Okabe and a team from TMDU in Japan, they used pigs, mice, and rats to demonstrate this phenomenon. They started with depriving them of oxygen, right, breathing. And then they administered oxygen-rich enemas. They tested them using liquid form and then they tested them using just a gas form. In both cases, oxygen was absolutely absorbed by the blood vessels, which means their circulatory system was carrying oxygen that came from this delivery mechanism. The initial inspiration for this research came from the fact that other kinds of animals already can do this like catfish and sea cucumbers absorb oxygen through their nether regions. And apparently a scientist or researcher decided how well can mammals do this. So why would anybody want to do this, right? Steve gave a good reason. You know, it's just another entry point to give somebody something that they need. But in some medical emergencies, hypoxia due to respiratory failure lack of oxygen is due to a respiratory failure. This could be one way to get the patient oxygen. It's not the nicest way to do it, but if it saves lives, I assure you it's better than dying, right? I mean, you got to think about it. Who cares? You got to do something to literally save your life. And let me give you an example. This method could have possibly saved a lot of people's lives who went into respiratory failure from pneumonia and COVID-19, right? We had respirators.

B: Really?

J: Massive, massive need of respirators during COVID-19, right? I read about it almost every week. You're hearing another report of India right now needs respirators like nobody's business.

B: Won't you call that an asspirator?

J: Oh God, Bob, that was great. So there's a critical, there was a critical shortage. I would assume that there's still a shortage in a lot of countries. And from the research that they produced, this method could likely be enough to keep someone alive. And the researchers have to continue to explore this method just to make sure that there's nothing hazardous about it. You know, what are the side effects? How do you do it efficiently and most effectively? And Steve, they did name this something different. The name of this method is enteral ventilation via anus, EVA, which also, EVA also stands for-

S: Extravehicular activity.

J: Yes. Which I mean, it's all coming together. So it would likely be used in ICUs and emergency rooms first. And if this method proves out, it will actually be a legitimate scientific contribution. No shit.

B: That's the goal.

J: Yeah, that's the goal. That's the optimal situation.

B: But I mean, medicine is one thing, but if you're doing that and you're like not taking in any air conventionally, but you are anally, what would that take in terms of how much air and what kind of device could actually do that? That's my question. What would it take?

S: It wouldn't be optimal, but if you think about it, so first of all, like how much oxygen gets absorbed into the blood is determined by the difference in the partial pressure of oxygen. So the less oxygen there is in the blood and the more oxygen there is in the air, the more of that oxygen will diffuse into the blood. So if you put a 100% O2 into somebody who is at 90%, let's say arterial O2, that will increase the absorption of the oxygen. And again, it's not meant to be fully functional, like this is adequate respiration. It's just meant as an emergency maneuver to keep somebody alive. If your lungs are filled with fluid, then this is better than nothing. But you know, this is also-

E: This is the emergency backup system.

S: Yeah. This is also not the first non-pulmonary respiration that people have used. We do peritoneal oxygenation. In other words, intra-abdominal, because the peritoneum is another sort of highly vascularized tissue. And you can just be pumping up oxygen in there. It gets absorbed into the blood and that it could be enough, again, to keep people from dying long enough for their lungs to recover from whatever you're doing to them.

B: What about the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet? They're highly vascularized as well.

S: Yeah, but the skin's too thick.

E: But how are you going to get through that?

S: Yeah, you need a mucus membrane that has blood vessels close to the surface and will be very permeable and yet highly vascular. The skin is not good for the oxygenation.

B: In the future, when they have breath-holding contests, are they going to have to check your butt and make sure there's nothing there?

S: Yeah, right.

J: Somebody was going to say that. I knew that was going to come up. The way you could cheat is you could have a little device that just leeches out oxygen.

S: All right, but I'm compelled to tell you guys that when you hold your breath, let's say you take a deep breath and hold it.

B: It's not the lack of oxygen, right?

S: It's not the lack of oxygen.

E: It's carbon dioxide.

S: It's build up of CO2.

B: Yes.

S: When you are-

B: But eventually, the oxygen comes into play.

S: It's not until long after you're gasping for breath. It's the CO2 is what drives your desperation to breathe.

E: Get the CO2 out.

S: Now, if you want to know the difference, if you want to know the difference, take a deep breath and hold it where you have plenty of oxygen in there to keep going. And then exhale as much as you can from your lungs and hold that. And you'll see that's lack of oxygen because now your lungs are mostly empty. There's not a lot of air in there, and so you don't have oxygen to exchange for a while. So you'll see you begin to gasp for air much quicker when you exhale.

B: Well, I mean, okay. That sounds kind of obvious.

S: Yeah, I'm just saying that when you exhale, the oxygen is what runs out first. When you inhale and hold your breath, it's the CO2 buildup that compels you to breathe first. Long before oxygen would be a problem.

B: Well, that's why if you're holding your breath, one technique when it's getting really bad is to blow off some CO2, and that gives you an extra kick to last a little longer.

S: Yeah, it gives you...

B: It's another way to show you.

S: Right, right, right.

E: Steve, the difference between going through the stomach, going through the butt, risk of infection difference?

S: Yeah, the peritoneum technically, not the stomach. So that's the connective tissue in the abdomen. So it's again, it's like the sheet of vascularized tissue, lots of surface area, which is what you need. So that's the key. So yeah, that would be invasive though, right, whereas the butt is a hole. So...

B: But less surface area.

S: Yeah, it's less surface area, but you don't have to make an incision or anything. You already have access to it from the outside.

E: So right there, that seems to be an advantage.

S: Yeah, right. So it's a less invasive procedure. Is it enough? Maybe in some people. Maybe you might get them over the hump, you know. If not, then you have peritoneal as an option. These are in cases where for whatever reason, you can't use the lung. There's also extra corporeal oxygenation where you do it outside the body, like a heart-lung machine. That's the other option as well. So it's just one more option of several.

B: I wonder what that would feel like. Imagine you got one of these a well-made, efficient thing in your butt to help you breathe. And then I wonder if it would be enough where you're like, you could feel it. You could feel the decreased need of oxygen. And would that impact your breathing? And how would that feel? That's kind of an interesting idea, I think.

S: Yeah, probably.

B: You know, would it be noticeable?

S: Yeah, but in practice, this would be somebody who's sedated, you know. It's not like-

B: I'm way beyond that, Steve. I'm going way beyond that.

E: Because of the discomfort involved?

J: Yeah, I would imagine.

S: Just give you that. If you're so sick that you can't breathe-

B: If you need that, you're not doing well for lots of reasons.

S: All right. Let's move on. So I've spoken of-

B: Hey, I want to keep talking about- All right. We got to move on.

Bullshit and Intelligence (20:35)

• Bullshit and Intelligence

S: I've spoken a few times in the past about bullshit, which is a technical, psychological term. Do you know what it is?

B: Yes.

E: I think you mentioned it.

B: You don't care about the truth or lying. You just like to hear grandiose-sounding bullshit dialogue.

S: Yeah. So here's one technical definition. Communication characterized by an intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth. So it's not lying. When you're lying, technically, is when you know what you're saying is false. When you're bullshitting, you don't care. You have no concern for whether or not it's true. It's optimized to be compelling and impressive. But-

B: I get that distinction.

S: Regardless of whether or not it's true.

B: I get that distinction. But still, you could be a bullshitter then, and you know that. You know it's not the truth. So is it-

S: Yeah.

B: Are you then lying?

S: Yeah. So when you're bullshitting, you just don't care. You may say something that you know is not true. That is true. It may be true. You have no idea. It's the whole spectrum. It's without concern for the truth. So it could be true. It could be a lie. You may or may not know. It doesn't matter.

E: Right. That becomes regardless.

B: But can you still be a bullshitter if in the course of bullshitting, you say something that you know is not true? You just know it. Then what? Do you quickly dip into being a liar, and then you go back to being a bullshitter?

S: No. As I said, they're not mutually exclusive. You could be lying and bullshitting at the same time.

B: I didn't hear that. See, I didn't hear that part. That's a critical part of it.

J: This is for the shades of gray, Bob.

B: Gotcha.

S: Right. So anyway-

E: Shades of brown.

S: This is an interesting follow-up study into the psychology of bullshitting. And they were asking a very specific question. Now I find the question and the results of the research interesting, and the conclusions of the researchers completely unconvincing. So there's sort of two layers here that I wanted to talk about. Let's talk first about the researcher's hypothesis and the data, and whether or not I think how the data relates to that hypothesis. So the question is, what is the primary evolutionary purpose for intelligence? Right? It's kind of a big question. And yes-

B: To impress girls?

S: Yes. We're getting into evolutionary psychology, which is, I think, inherently problematic. Doesn't mean, I think it's without scientific merit. I just think that the questions rapidly get horrifically complicated and multifactorial. And it's hard to say A caused B, or this was the evolutionary reason for something. And a lot of traits, this is partly why, and I think intelligence is probably the poster child for this, has multiple benefits. And so you can't say that this multifaceted, general ability was evolved for this one reason. It's like, why did we evolve strength to do this one thing? No. It's pretty generically useful for a lot of things. Okay. But trying to break it down into some big categories, you could ask, was the ability to function well in a social environment an important driving factor for the evolution of intelligence in humans? Because we are such an intensely social species, and the ability to socialize is intellectually demanding, it stands to reason that that was an important driver of intelligence. And I think that that's a reasonable hypothesis. It sounds like that probably was true of dogs as well. Dogs are intelligent, they have the cortical density that they have, partly because they had to embed themselves into the social fabric of humans and they're social to begin with. And so, yeah, I buy that. I buy that as a hypothesis, it's plausible. But here's how they chose to test it. So therefore, if intelligence is mainly driven by social skill, so we're going to pick bullshitting as a social skill, and we're going to see if intelligence correlates with the ability to bullshit, a willingness to bullshit, and how people perceive your intelligence based upon your ability to bullshit. Got it?

J: Mm-hmm.

B: Yeah.

S: That's the part that I think is really weak, by the way. But let's talk about the research that they did.

B: Yeah, it sounds a little suspect.

S: Yeah. In fact, I think if anything, it might be the opposite, but I'll explain what I mean by that. So they first evaluated people's willingness to bullshit. So they gave them 10 topics, 10 like just concepts, four of which were completely made up, and said, do you know what this is, and can you give a brief description of what this is?

B: Interesting. Yeah, that would work.

S: Yeah. Right? So here are four examples of non-existent topics, subjunctive scaling, declarative fraction-

B: What was the second one?

S: Declarative fraction, genetic autonomy, and neural acceptance. Those are pretty funny. I like those.

E: Yeah.

B: Yeah, I like them.

S: They're cromulons phrases. They sound like something that might be real.

B: Except the first couple didn't, but the last few did.

S: Subjunctive scaling? Of course. That's like perfectly cromulon. Okay. So the question was, would people say, yeah, I know what declarative fraction is, absolutely. And then-

B: Subjective scaling, maybe, but no. Go ahead.

S: Yeah. And they said, okay, can you give a brief description of it? And then they sort of had, obviously, it doesn't exist, so they would have to make something up. So this is sort of their willingness to bullshit. And then they had other people evaluate their fake definitions and said, how accurate do you think this definition is? And how satisfying is this definition? And so that was sort of their ability to bullshit. So there's their willingness to bullshit, and then their ability to bullshit. And then they said, how intelligent do you think these people are? Right?

B: Nice. Okay.

S: And then they also measured their actual intelligence based upon-

B: Of course.

S: On two scales, on a verbal scale and an abstract reasoning scale. So here's what they found. People who were more intelligent were less willing to bullshit, but they were better able to do it. They were better at bullshitting. So their bullshit answers were rated more highly than people who were less intelligent.

E: Okay. So they can fake it.

S: They can fake it.

B: Sounds kind of like what I would expect.

S: Right? Right? Yeah. We'll get to that. And they also perceived them as being more intelligent. So okay, that kind of goes along with it. So then they also did another piece where they evaluated their receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit. Now we've talked about that before on the show. Do you remember what that is?

B: Yeah. I'm trying to remember.

S: So these are like Chakra-esque phrases that sound superficially profound, but actually mean nothing.

E: But it means zero.

B: They're like vacuous nonsense.

S: Yeah, they're vacuous and they're actually generated by random word.

B: Yeah. Right.

S: Generated by random phrase generators.

B: I remember that generator.

S: And there are multiple websites that will do this for you, that will generate random phrases that sound nice, but they really, really don't mean anything. So what they found is that people who were more willing to bullshit were also more susceptible to bullshit, to pseudo-profound bullshit. So okay, none of that's surprising. I find it all very interesting, but I completely disagree with their interpretation. The authors state, this association is consistent with the hypothesis that producing satisfying and seemingly accurate explanations of completely fictional concepts is perceived by individuals as a signal of intelligence. Okay. So then they use that to say that supports the hypothesis that social skills like bullshitting are actually an evolutionary force for intelligence. So this is why I think that that's probably not true. I think if anything, I would argue it the opposite way around. So first of all, having greater verbal and abstracting skills, of course you're going to be better at bullshitting. Of course you are.

B: Yeah.

E: Yeah. You have a wider variety of tools in that box.

S: Exactly. You're going to be better at a lot of things. You know, verbal skill is like going to make you good at any verbal task. And you know, and the ability to abstract is going to make you better at anything that requires creativity, like making up a definition for a fake thing, right? So why wouldn't those things correlate? I don't think that supports their hypothesis at all. But what do you think about this? I thought if bullshitting were a special skill, like that was a privileged skill that was selected for because it provided a selective advantage in a social species, wouldn't you think people who chose a strategy of being a good bullshitter as their way of surviving in society would have bullshitting ability above and beyond their genetic intelligence, their generic intelligence?

B: Yeah, absolutely.

S: Right? So the fact that it correlates with generic intelligence, you could argue it falsifies or is against the hypothesis because it should be out of proportion to intelligence if it were specifically selected for, not just an epiphenomenon of generic or general intelligence. Doesn't that make sense?

B: Yeah. Totally.

E: You know what that reminded me of, Steve? We all watched The Walking Dead way back when. And the character Eugene. Do you remember the character Eugene? The scientist.

B: I was thinking about him. I was just thinking about him, dude.

E: Yes. He's supposedly the scientist who knows what the disease was and potentially how to cure it. But it was all bullshit. He used it as a survival advantage to encourage other people to help keep him alive and protect him.

B: To make him valuable.

E: Brilliant use of bullshit.

B: Yes, it was. That was a nice-

S: It was. And he was intelligent but not very social. So not a good example if you wanted to support this hypothesis. But anyway, the whole bullshit thing I think is very interesting as a phenomenon. It is a kind of a strategy that certain people pursue. But I hate to say this, but it fits my preconceived notions that it's something that less intelligent people do. This could be just purely a bias of mine. And maybe because I'm an academic and this is sort of anti-academic. So it could be that people who are more intelligent tend to be more academic and academics tend to be anti-bullshit because we value truth. So it could be, again, be an epiphenomenon of that. But I do think it makes sense to me that the smarter you are, the less likely you would be to just throw truth aside, right? And that if you're not very smart-

B: Right, because you got truth by the balls because you're really smart.

S: But the other thing is if you're someone who's impressed by bullshit, then you might think, yeah, bullshitting is a good strategy. I'll use it myself. So this idea that you can't bullshit a bullshitter I think is nonsense. I think, in fact, and this is not the first study to show-

B: Yeah, it's easy.

S: You can bullshit a bullshitter.

B: It's easy.

S: People who bullshit are not that smart because they think bullshitting is a good idea when in fact it isn't.

B: In my view, Steve, bullshitting is a short-term advantage thing. Over the long term, generally, I would think people would realize what the hell you're doing and shun you. Get out of my life.

S: I agree.

B: Bullshitters.

S: I totally agree. That's the other thing. We tend to find that people who bullshit overuse it and it is one of those things that may work if you use it very sparingly.

B: Selectively and intelligently, which you probably aren't.

S: Here's the thing. Maybe there are people who do do that and we don't know because they are successful.

E: We haven't realized it yet.

S: We don't detect the successful bullshitters because they are selective and they are good at it. And so that could be possible. Right? So that's a toupee fallacy. I can always tell when someone's wearing a toupee. I always can tell when someone's bullshitting except you don't know when you can tell when someone's bullshitting because by definition, you can't detect it. So yeah, interesting. And this is now a subject of psychological research and I do hope that it continues because I do think it's kind of an important aspect of human psychology and cognitive biases. Also I think it's part of critical thinking skills. It's like we have to understand conspiracy thinking. We have to understand what makes a bullshitter tick and how to detect it and how it gets used and what kind of people use it. I think it's part of the skeptical toolkit.

B: How we fool ourselves too.

E: Absolutely. And like you said about bullshitting a bullshitter, we already know that some very intelligent people can be tricked by some very simple tricks in fact. We've seen it all the time. It plays out again and again in the topics that we cover as part of the skeptical community. So I'm not at all surprised by that.

S: Well that I think is explained by the fact that generic intelligence, whatever that is, right? Like there really isn't, it's hard to know what that means. You have to say what kind of intelligence, but you could be intelligent in certain ways. Ways that will make you be perceived of as generally intelligent. Maybe that's a better way of putting it, but lack critical thinking skills and be highly gullible. People who are otherwise intelligent can be highly gullible. The other thing is, all right, I also likened certain very, I think, inarticulate and terrible bullshitters to terrible psychics. So we know like something like Sylvia Brown, right? If you think about Sylvia Brown as a mentalist, she was horrible. She had no skill. She was transparent. But people believed her and she was a worldwide sensation. Why? Because she didn't sell herself as a mentalist. She sold herself as a psychic. She targeted a gullible audience who was willing to believe and she told them what they wanted to hear. So she didn't have to be good. So I think that there are certain markets of bullshitters like politics, where if you, or I would say maybe the pulpit in some cases, where if you tell people what they want to hear, consistent with their culture, their identity, their ideology, their tribe, their worldview, then you don't have to be good. You don't have to be good.

E: Nope. Sophisticated or anything.

S: Yeah, because people want to believe. They will do all the hard work for you. And that, think about it that, so if you're outside the tribe, the bullshit is blatant and obvious. But if you're inside the tribe, then your motivated reasoning kicks in and you find it compelling and believable. And so that creates a huge disconnect between people where like, I can't imagine how anybody would possibly believe that, you know? But of course, then for many people, we believe the things that are consistent with our tribe and our worldview.

B: Compartmentalization. Yep. It's part of that.

S: But it's good to understand all of that as a general human phenomenon. And it sort of gives us the ability to realize, no, that's not a stupid person. That's a normal person who is gullible to things that reinforce their tribe. Like all of us do, unless you spend a lot of effort to rise above it. And then even then, you have to be ever vigilant. If you ever think you've succeeded, that's just another way of deceiving yourself. You have to be ever vigilant about that in yourself more than anything else. As Feynman said, you should what was exactly the exact quote? You should be wary of fooling people and you're the easiest person to fool. Right?

B: Yeah.

S: The easiest person for you to fool is yourself, basically. Okay, let's move on.

Brightest Cosmic Light (37:33)

• Brightest cosmic light detected on Tibetan Plateau may help rewrite laws of physics

S: Bob, you're going to tell us about the brightest light in the cosmos.

B: Yeah, this was pretty interesting. A Chinese observatory on the Tibetan plateau has found the highest energy gamma ray light ever found, which is really part of a series of discoveries, putting us on the doorstep of finally understanding the origin of the most powerful cosmic rays we've seen. All of which has essentially created a new era for astronomy called ultra high energy gamma astronomy. All right. So there's a lot of pieces to unpack here. Let's start simple. We'll start with gamma rays. Gamma rays are not rays. They're light. The most energetic and my favorite type of light that there is. We all know the EM, the electromagnetic spectrum, right? From low to high, radio, microwave, infrared, visible, UV, x-ray, gamma rays. Top of the heap. Top of the heap.

E: Ask David Banner.

B: Yeah, right? They're the shortest wavelength of electromagnetic waves, and so they impart the highest photon energy. It's very penetrating electromagnetic radiation. It can go through concrete, metal, nasty stuff in many ways. Gamma rays are created by nuclear processes like radioactive decay, but they're also associated with very powerful sources of energy in the universe that also create the most energetic cosmic rays. That segues us to cosmic rays. They're also not really rays. They're highly accelerated atom fragments from deep space. That's like the pithiest way I can think of to describe them. They're mostly protons, and they typically have more energy than any other known particles in the universe. If you come across an energetic particle hitting the earth, it's probably going to be a cosmic ray. They pack energies of 100 to 1,000 tera electron volts, trillion electron volts, and higher. They're created by powerful events like stars colliding, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae. Interesting and mysterious stuff. And then this leads, of course, to the Oh My God particle, or I suppose the OMG particle in modern parlance. So 16 days before Halloween on October, obviously, 1991, the OMG cosmic ray particle was detected. Now this was probably a proton probably a 90% chance that this was a proton, but it was an ultra high energy cosmic ray, the most powerful ever seen at the time, three times 10 to the 20 electron volts. Huge. It's 100 quintillion times the energy of visible light. This was so, there's so much kinetic energy.

S: How much?

B: How much? It was traveling, it was traveling at 99.999999999999999999999.51% the speed of light. So this was so close to the speed of light that if this thing was created traveling at that speed, right next to a beam of regular light, it would lose only one half, one and a half femtometers per second slower than light. This is right there at the edge and it's matter. This isn't a photon. This is a proton. It's a matter. And I got a geek out on this a little bit more. This is so interesting. Now Jay, if you're moving in the frame of reference of the particle, how slow would time be compared to right now? The answer to that is 300 billion times slower. This thing is going so close to the speed of light-

S: How close does it go?

B: 99.999999999999999999999999 So for example, for example, for example, if you were traveling along with this cosmic ray and you were going to say Alpha Centauri, which is 4.36 light years away, right? If you were traveling at the speed of light, and you were watching, you were like observing this happen, it would take you 4.36 light years by definition. But if you were in the frame of reference of that particle, you would get to Alpha Centauri in point four, three milliseconds, milliseconds, right? You'd be like, oh, crap, there goes Alpha Centauri. I missed it. Bob's gonna be pissed. I didn't take a selfie. And one more example, Andromeda Galaxy, right? 2,180,000 light years away, you would be buzzing by that in 3.5 minutes. I mean, this is amazingly fast. The energy what, what created this? I mean, it's amazing. And then you got to think, well, what kind of a wallop would a proton traveling with that much kinetic energy pack? I mean, it's just a proton, right? I mean, how bad could it be? Well, the the the OMG particle, it's an atomic nucleus, it had a kinetic energy of 48 joules. So that means I'd imagine 142 gram baseball hitting you in the face at 58 miles per hour, or 93.6 kilometers per hour of a baseball. This is just a proton. This is how much energy this thing was packing. Then the big question here is what would accelerate a proton to that velocity? We don't know. There's nothing we've ever created in any particle accelerator on the earth that that's near that. We don't know what could have what could have created that much kinetic energy. Now you can't just look at the paths of the cosmic rays, right? You can't look at the direction the cosmic ray was traveling and then trace it back to the source. You know, that would be like tracing the trajectory of a thrown meatball back to Jay's hand. Because cosmic rays are charged. And that means that that any magnetic field in the galaxy would change its trajectory. So you can't once you see it, like oh, it could have come from literally the opposite direction. And it's completely different now because it's charged. So now gamma rays, though, are not charged, they follow a straight line in curved space, of course. So if you detect a cosmic ray, you could just just trace it back. And you could see where what region of space it came from. And since energetic cosmic rays can be associated with energetic gamma rays, if you trace the gamma ray back to its source, then you can also potentially find the source of a high energy cosmic ray particle like the OMG particle. So after all that, that's exactly what China's large high altitude air shower observatory lasso is doing. And it's quite a construct. This thing has it's like 4300 meters up on a mountain 5000 detectors spread over more than a square kilometer. And they capture these daughter particles created when a high intensity gamma ray hits the atmosphere, it creates all these secondary daughter particles that shower down, including muons. Muons can reach fairly deep into the atmosphere. And the only reason they can, by the way, is because they're traveling close to the speed of light, which which makes them live longer because time is going slower for them subjectively. So they've got 1000 muon detectors underground to detect as well. So now the researchers recently looked at the whole past year's data from from lasso, and they found 530 high energy gamma ray photons, including the most energetic gamma ray photon any photon ever found. It had 1.4 peta electron volts to 1.4 peta, that's 10 to the 15 electron volts 1.4 quadrillion electron volts. We've never seen anything like it. Remember Thor's mother of all lightning bolts from Ragnarok that well, that's the mother of all photons. I love that movie so much. And luckily these gamma rays that the gamma rays that they found could be traced back to about 12 distinct areas in our galaxy where they came from. But the most energetic rays came from a stellar nursery region called the Cygnus cocoon. Is that is that cool? Kind of adorable, the Cygnus cocoon. And so this was a surprise, though, because it was only really thought previously that only stellar remnants like pulsars, and things like that could accelerate cosmic rays, they didn't think they thought old dead stars were doing it, not necessarily, young new stars. So it looks like to be a mix of both potentially, because some of the other sources that they detected were things like in Cygnus that were supernova remnants. Guess what they call these areas where where you've got these high energy gamma rays and console grays, they are coming from, they call they call them Phil. Yeah, the first name is Phil. The second name is pevatrons, which is which is a great plan. It's a I think it's a great it's a great word, because it because pevatron, peta electron volt that accelerates particles to stratospheric peta electron volt energy. So it's called a pevatron. You know, like other colliders have that Tron at the end cyclotron, whatever. But okay, they found these pevatrons. That's awesome. These pevatrons are creating super high energy cosmic rays and gamma rays. That's wonderful. Well, how does it do it? Okay, how does that work? We're still not sure. Because if you if you kind of run the numbers they could explain maybe 100 trillion volts, or a thousand or even 1000. But not 10 times that amount. They can't, they don't know actually, exactly how these pevatrons are working and accelerating these, this radiation and these particles to such a high degree. Luckily, though, the detectors are not at full power. And hopefully in the near future, this new field of astronomy of ultra high energy gamma astronomy will make even more discoveries to answer these questions. And maybe they'll find another record breaking gamma ray or cosmic ray that I will call the OMFG particle.

S: Thanks, Bob.

UFOs Again (46:40)

• UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomna due next month

S: All right, Evan, I see that the same old UFO stories are making another round. What is happening?

E: Well, I think we can credit 60 minutes for the latest revival in the old UFO stories being dusted off. Now, can I assume that the majority of our audience knows what 60 minutes is? You think that's fair?

B: An hour?

E: You know, the show itself, yes, called 60 minutes. Mainstay of CBS the Columbia broadcast system here in America, since 1968, Jay, it's as old as you are.

J: Right.

E: And a year older than me. And there's lots of versions and variations of 60 minutes around the world. And of course, you can get the American version around the world. So I think we can safely assume that most people know when I say 60 minutes, what we're talking about. So 60 minutes has been referred to as one of the most esteemed news magazines on American television. That's straight out of the New York Times. Those are their words. And 60 minutes has had and still in relative terms has a massive audience. So I looked it up in the late 70s and early 1980s. It was drawing a 28 average share for ratings. And what that means, I mean, that is huge. It's the third largest show in all of television. No other news show even hit the like the top 30. So it was all alone as far as this goes. And today it still has a 10 average rate. And when you have a bazillion options like you do now, that's still for what it is a very impressive number. The show has poll, the show has influence, no doubt about it. So when a show of that prominence does a story on UFOs, or we can use the more modern cognomen UAPs, which are unidentified aerial phenomena, then you know a good chunk of the country and perhaps the world is going to stop and take notice of this. And that's what we got this past Sunday in this highly talked about 60 minutes segment titled UAP. And it was presented by Bill Whitaker. And here's what they presented in the span of 13 minutes. I'm going to try to sum it up in three minutes or less. Got to give it my best shot. All right. Here's how they open up the segment. They say, we've tackled many strange stories on 60 minutes, but perhaps none like this. It's the story of the US government's grudging acknowledgement of unidentified aerial phenomena. After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there's something out there. And the US Senate wants to know what it is. The Senate Intelligence Committee has ordered the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings by next month, meaning June. That's the opening monologue. Okay. So they jump into it right away by interviewing Luis Elizondo. Now that name, that name sounds familiar. Oh, because it is familiar. In fact, it's very familiar. I know that I've talked about Luis Elizondo several times over the course of the last few years when especially when we've been talking about UFOs and UAPs. Let me sum up for you who he is. He's a former US military intelligence official. And he ran the Department of Defense's now defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. And he ran it from 2007. Well, he was involved with it from 2007. He took over command of it in 2010. And he was part of it to its end in 2012. So he was part of it for five years. And you and I and every other taxpayer in America paid the way for it $22 million for this program before it got mothballed. And it ran for five full years, but you didn't know about it because it was classified. And we only learned about this in 2017. And that's when we first talked about it on the Skeptics Guide. So here are some things that he said in the 60 Minutes interview. The US government has already stated for the record that UFOs or UAPs are real. I'm not telling you that the United States government is telling you that. He goes on, he says, imagine a technology that can do six to 700 g forces that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour that can evade radar and that can fly through the air and water and possibly space. Oh, and by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces, and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.

J: That's right. You better believe it.

E: Now. Okay, Luis Elizondo. All right. Hang on, let me back up again about the $22 million. And when he was in charge of it, you know where much of that money went that Elizondo doled out as part of that department, it went to Robert Bigelow's aerospace company, Robert Bigelow. Bigelow's company hired the researchers who did the investigations as part of this project. Now, Robert Bigelow, that's another name familiar to SGU listeners. He was once interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes, and he said he was absolutely convinced that aliens, I mean, we're talking extraterrestrial aliens exist and that UFOs have definitely visited the Earth. And it's not just that. I've talked about him in the context of Skinwalker Ranch. Do you guys remember this?

B: Yeah.

J: Yes, I do.

E: A haunted ranch in Utah described by true believers as a hyperdimensional portal area or Stargate as we like to think of it. And the ranch is said to be infested by an alien or paranormal shape-shifting creature known as a skinwalker. And it takes on the context of kind of what the werewolves are in more European legends. So 60 Minutes, of course, doesn't go into that kind of detail. But that's all right. I'm helping 60 Minutes out here. I'm filling the gaps. I'm just putting it in context so that you know who Luis Elizondo is and the kind of company and things, company he keeps and ideas that he keeps.

S: Because you wouldn't know that from watching the 60 Minutes.

E: No, you would not. Not one bit. So this is the credibility of the first person that they interview. Okay. So you have a true believer with military intelligence resources and $22 million that he doled out to other true believers. Surprise, surprise, what do you get as a result of all that intelligence and research? Technology that defies all of the laws of physics, if not many of them. So then they start, then they shift. They jump into interviewing some of the Navy pilots whose video footage is going to be part of this report to the Senate. And they are finally declassified to the point where they can now come out and talk about them.

J: Now, because you know, when they come out of the darkness, it's never bullshit.

E: No, no, of course, of course, never, ever. Although they tend to be a little bit, I think, more practical than perhaps some of the other people that come up as part of the 60 Minutes segment. So one fellow's name is Ryan Graves. And he was part of an F-18F squadron. And he was part of the group that saw the Virginia Beach UAP phenomenon in 2014. And his squadron was also part of the sighting in Jacksonville, Florida, 2015. These are the video footage from the US Navy planes that were captured of these objects, apparently, flying around doing incredible things that when you watch it on video, yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It looks pretty impressive. How could it be possibly they're tracking, they've got it locked on, and they're tracking something that is flying at what seems like a totally unreasonable speed over the ocean, so small, so hard to detect it, and then it starts shifting and going in 90 degrees in this way. No way it could possibly really be doing this as far as the laws of physics are concerned. So they go into also speaking to another person, Christopher Mellon. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for Presidents Clinton and George Bush. He had access to the secret government programs, and he's a defender of Elizondo and the entire program. And then they finish up by talking to Marco Rubio, who is on the Intelligence Committee for the Senate, and they get some quotes from him. And that's basically it. Maybe that wasn't three minutes, but I did my best. So that's what 60 Minutes packaged for their worldwide audience to watch. I have a question for 60 Minutes. Where was the skeptical representation in any of this? If they had contacted anyone, any one of the numerous skeptical organizations out there, they would have had no trouble whatsoever finding people to come on and offer some rather prosaic explanations for what was going on. Let me give you an example. Mick West, that's a name I think our audience is very familiar with. Mick West has been on a lot of different skeptical shows. He's given talks at CSICon, and he's been out there for 10 years, specifically talking about this phenomenon, and these particular sets of video footage that are captured by these Department of Defense Navy planes.

S: It's a good man, and not just because he has our book on his bookshelf. That's completely incidental to my opinion.

E: Completely incidental that our book holds a space on his bookshelf when he's giving interviews from his office. Thank you, Mick. So full disclosure, right? So he's become, I think, the go-to person in the skeptic community for this type of video analysis. His analysis is pretty easy to understand. It makes the fewest new or unknown assumptions, and it requires zero appeals to things like breaking the laws of physics. He basically boils it down to this. You get the basic data, okay? Who shot it? Where it was shot? What time of day or night was it? What direction was the camera facing? What was the hardware itself? What kind of lens were they using? What was the exposure? What other metadata can you get from the information? Try to also get the original source video. By the time you see some of these things on the internet, it's gone through pixelation and manipulation and other things. So try to get the original source video. And then what you do is you take that, and then you recreate the conditions in which it happened. If it was the night sky, you'd use the star positions. You can figure out where you were and what the positions of the stars were at night and the positions of the planets, such as Venus, which we know often comes up as getting in the way of otherwise analysis of certain things that you're seeing in the night sky. And then you can utilize online flight data websites. For example, there's one called Flightradar24, and you can track a plane or the history of the flight of a plane, and you can get it back to a very specific date and time and position. And when you do that, when you put all those pieces of the puzzle together, lo and behold, you can figure out that, okay, this camera in this position at this time of day, this plane was here. Delta Flight 400 out of Los Angeles, for example, was hey, look, right exactly along that flight path, and perhaps at that time was right there. So he's able to put it together. And he basically kind of did this of his own initiative. And over the years, he's been able to analyze the footage this way and come up with, frankly, a lot of straightforward answers as to what it was these pilots and other things that have been captured, what they were seeing. And in most cases, it's other aircraft. That for whatever reason, the pilots themselves or they can't determine when the Department of Defense looks at these things, exactly what they're looking at. Mick was able to kind of put it together. But there are also other things. There's birds there's glare, other objects, balloons, he talks about. And he also talks about how the hardware also works, especially on some of these cameras. There's all sorts of artifacts that occur. All of this stuff is known to us in the skeptical community. We talk about this. We've been talking about it for decades now. This does not come as a surprise to us. But you put it on a 60 Minutes program, and they present it to the world like this is some sort of blockbusters, something so special that the strangest thing we've ever reported on in our 50 years of being one of the top news shows in the history of broadcasting. It kind of takes on a different life and a different set of importance that perhaps other people will then say, hey, there's really something going on here. But had they been paying attention or had they consulted the skeptical community sooner, I think they would have realized this is not news, new news, at least. It is old news. And it's already been explained.

S: Yeah, shame on 60 Minutes. Seriously, they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. I know that, it's easy to be cynical and say they don't care about their journalistic integrity. But I think this is just an absolute journalistic failure. They didn't give us sufficient information. They didn't tell the actual story. They didn't tell the actual story about what's going on here. And the information was available to them. They really have no excuse. They just didn't want to. They told the story they wanted to tell. Yeah, it's terrible.

B: Yeah, it's, it's really frustrating. I looked around hard for some good treatments to the of this, most recent version of this news item, trying to find some real good skeptical or scientific treatments. And I haven't seen any yet. And so that was kind of kind of frustrating and disappointing. But for me, a lot of this goes back to I'll even give one of Louis Elizondo's quotes. He's like, sometimes there are simple explanations for the objects, but sometimes there aren't. Well, the thing is, though, that sometimes there's just not enough information. And you can't then, therefore, well it's so blurry. And we we've ruled out this, this and this, and then therefore, they make the leap, oh, it's got to be some sort of super advanced technology from another country, or alien technology, like, no, sometimes you just have to just have to, like, accept the the ignorance, the lack of information. And you say, we're probably never going to know what this is, because there simply isn't enough information. You can't say you can't even really even throw out this idea that it may be some other country has technology that's like a century beyond what we have, or if not a century, then at least a few, like three or four generations beyond beyond what we have, which is ridiculous, because we would we would know about it, we would know about it. And you can't hide something like that.

S: Yeah, that's the thing. Again, for skeptics, this is such old news, because it's like, at the end of the day, it's a dot, it's a blob, it's a blur, it's not information. And you're making an argument from ignorance. And they completely underestimate the potential for miss identification in terms of everything, size, speed, angle it's so easy. And a lot of these times when they are figured out, like, oh, that was a bird. Oh, really? So you were all exercised about the amazing aerodynamic characteristics of what turned out to be a bird. So that means any, everything else you say is complete and utter horseshit. It's worthless. It's nothing, you don't have any reliable information, where we're exactly where we were in 1960. It's 60 years later, and we have the same level of evidence. There's a reason why we have only blurry photos, because in focus photos are not spacecraft. They're nothing interesting, right? When it's in focus, it's a plane or a bird but when it's out of focus, yeah, or a bug, when it's out of focus, you could imagine anything you want. But this we're not getting again, with all the new technology with ubiquitous phones, whatever, we have nothing, nothing. The simplest explanation is, there isn't anything. And keep in mind, nobody would love more than the four of us.

B: Oh, my God.

S: Where we did have compelling evidence of actual alien spacecraft or whatever. It would be fascinating. We would be all over that. All over. Yeah, it's just it's the reason why we're not convinced by it is because the evidence is not convincing, right? And that's the bottom line, right?

B: And if you keep thinking about well, but it was going at Mach 1 billion or whatever it was, listen, this is how you think about that. Because it's all about the assumptions you make. If you're assuming that this is a big thing that's far away, then yes, it would have to be traveling at 20, 30, 40 Mach. But if it's a very small thing that's closer to the camera than you ever imagined, then it's a normal thing that's traveling at normal speeds. Yeah, it's when you make that leap between when you don't have enough information. That's when you get these claims of superphysics and super tech that we can't explain.

J: It's just shit reporting. That's what it boils down to.

E: It's terrible.

J: There's no other way to look at it. And it's the, in my opinion, it's the reason why we're talking about it right now is because it's our job to call these people out.

B: It's click porn.

J: And what's the real outcome of this? Like, they're never gonna feel the heat. They're never gonna, care company that big news news outlet that big.

E: Well, no, there people are talking about it, Jay. It's gonna it got ratings. And people days afterwards are continuing to comment about it. They got it exactly what they want.

S: Exactly. And they'll, whatever, publish a correction somewhere, something, whatever, maybe, maybe.

E: Probably not.

S: But they've already got already accomplished what they wanted to accomplish.

E: That's right. Remember the old Woody Woodpecker cartoon? If Woody had gone right to the police? It would never happened. Well, if 60 minutes went right to the skeptical community, this report may not have ever happened. And therefore, one must wonder if yeah, they kind of deliberately didn't go to seek an opposite opinion here.

S: You have to wonder if like at the executive level, it's like, do we want to get this story right? Or do we have enough plausible deniability here? Or we could put this story out. Who cares if it's right or wrong? We can defend putting it out. That's what really matters. Not is it right? Is it defensible? And that but again, that's just horrible journalism. Horrible. All right. Not that we care about things like this. This definitely gets our skeptical hackles up.

E: Oh, yeah.

Who's That Noisy? (1:05:21)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Antenna rotator

S: All right, Jay, we need we need a palate cleanser. It is who's that noisy time?

J: Alright, guys, last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Isn't that so amazingly analog? I just love it. So what do you guys think that is?

E: You know what it sounds like to me, although I know this is incorrect. When you used to put the quarter in the gumball machine and turn the dial?

J: Yep.

E: To get the goodies. That's what it reminds me of.

J: Yeah, it has that latching kind of noise without a doubt. So I got a lot of guesses and a lot of people guess the same different things. So as an example, a lot of people thought that this was an old film camera like the kind that you had to like turn the crank to to to advance the film. So a listener named Jonas Fernbach wrote and said, Hey, Jay, some sort of miniature automated printing press or other stamping machine. Love you guys. Keep it up, Jonas. So that's not correct. But I totally see what you're saying. It does have it does have a when you say automated printing press, yeah, it has that kind of machine sound. It actually sounds I'll tell you right now, it's not as big as that not even close, but it does have a bigger sound to it than it actually is. So that is not correct. But let's keep going. Matt Tannenberg. I'm sorry. So don't worry again. Tinberg. Another listener named Matt Tinberg wrote and said, Hey, guys, hope you're doing well. This week's noisy sounds to me like one of those perpetual motion drinking birds pressing a button on the computer, much like the Simpsons episode where Homer works from home and has to vent the power plant periodically. That's pretty funny. I mean, I get what you're saying, but I don't see how the the bird pecking on a keyboard would would make that noise. But the visual was was fun to think about. And of course Homer always cracks me up. Next listener came in at this is Mark Gordon. He said Bob Jay man dude. It's a slide projector because I run who's that noisy. I know it's not a slide projector, but I wanted to hear that sound and I decided to play this one for you guys. So here's the old school slide projector. [plays Noisy]

E: Next slide.

J: Yep.

E: Next slide.

J: So without a doubt, this is a great guess. It's very close. Very, very close. It's not correct, but I'm gonna give you a half a point for just coming up with something that sounds very much like it. We have another person that wrote in Michael Blaney and he said, Hi, Jay. It sounds like one of those old computers with punch cards for data storage. So that's not correct. I have never heard that and I looked for it. I couldn't easily find that sound, but I will dig it up, but that is not correct. We have a winner and the winner is nobody. Nobody gets it. Yes, I know right.

E: Nobody. Isn't that a movie?

J: Yes, I saw that movie. It was George Hrab asked me to watch the movie. Nobody.

B: It was good. I loved it.

E: No spoilers. No spoilers.

J: I won't say anything other than it was very good. I really enjoyed it. So the person who sent this in is named Mark Lamarine and Mark wrote. Hey there love all your stuff. He's been wracking his brain trying to come up with a good noisy and then he realized he hadn't heard this distinctive sound. Of course, this is the sound. Now what this is is this is a very old school analog device that was used to rotate a roof mounted antenna. So it's aligned with the direction that the signal was coming from because if you think about it, those aerial antennas in general, the design is supposed to pick up your radiation coming from any direction, but they used to have to spin them and this thing would be able to now that clinking noise you're hearing is it actually turning it like I think it's-

B: Gear.

J: You know what is it a 16th? You know if you're looking at a compass in your head, it's moving it a 16th, a 16th, a 16th and I guess they keep moving it until the TV reception comes in the way that they want and then the person can stop it from from turning and I think later on they had automatic ones that were able to to find their way, but that clanking noise, just listen to it again. It's rotating a shaft that goes all the way up to the roof and literally turns an aerial antenna, so I think that was a pretty cool noise.

B: Unless you were on your roof years ago, you never would have heard it.

J: Well, I mean it was I did read a lot of stuff on the internet about this because it kind of piqued my curiosity and there's a lot of people that were discussing these things and they're like they're collector's items. You can find them on eBay. If you're interested, the unit is called an Alliance U100 Antenna Rotator. If you're into old school things, I highly recommend you check it out.

New Noisy (1:10:21)

J: I have a new noisy this week. This one was sent in by a listener named Justin Fisher. Okay, I'm going to be playing you the real time version of it and then a slowed down version of it just to give you a little bit more hopefully a little bit more information to see if you can guess what this is. [plays Noisy] That's the real-time one. There's one more. [plays Noisy] I will say that there is a reason why I wanted you to hear the slowed down version. I think it reveals a little bit more information. So, think about that while you're trying to figure this one out. You know, if you think you know it or you heard something really cool this week, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:11:13)

J: Steve.

S: Yes.

J: We have two NASA scientists that will be speaking at NECSS.

S: I know. It's awesome.

J: One of them is going to talk about the Artemis Moon mission and the other one will be talking about Mars and things that we are doing right now to build out early ideas and concepts for a Mars mission. All of our speakers are going to be up on the website by the time you hear this. You can go see the entire list of speakers that we have. I'm super excited about it. You know, we're just now coming out with our graphics for this year. I'll be putting it up on the website. Again, go check it out. It's a lot of fun. This year, we're talking about the future has landed. We're talking about science and technology that exists today. Things that you should know about and things that you hould have a better understanding of so you can really appreciate it because in the end, the science that's happening today really is the things that people from the past look forward to or didn't even know enough to realize that we were going to hit some of these milestones like CRISPR. That's an example, right? So, go to NECSS.org to get your tickets and don't let the two robots register before you because if they do, they'll take all the tickets and you can't see it. So, you gotta go. Hurry up, Evan.

E: I'll get there.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Email #1: Excited Delirium (1:12:28)

S: Alright, we're going to do one email. This comes from Andrew and Andrew writes, just finished the excellent episode of Behind the Bastards on excited delirium. We'd love to hear about this topic from a skeptical perspective. Is that something that you guys have heard about? Excited delirium?

E: I think so. It's a synonym, isn't it?

S: Are you bullshitting me or are you just, what if I threw out a random term there?

E: You'll never know.

S: Yeah. Alright. So, it's a controversial entity. The idea is that under the influence of certain recreational drug stimulants and perhaps medical conditions that somebody could get into an excited and delirious state, right? So, it's kind of self-explanatory in that way but that this is that it constitutes a discrete clinical syndrome where you know the delirium means that you can't, you're not thinking straight, you're confused, you're disoriented, and you're agitated, maybe even aggressive. But that this is that this is a medical condition and that in this state that you could just have just drop dead of a heart attack, you know. Why is this controversial? For a couple of reasons. So, one, it's, because it's a clinically, basically a clinically determined syndrome that there's a certain amount of fuzziness and subjectivity to it, right? You can't say, if you have this marker, this laboratory test, or whatever, where there's this really specific feature, then you have this discrete syndrome and here is a specific pathophysiology, right? Here's what's exactly going on that's producing it. Like with the seizure, we could say a seizure is defined by electrical, abnormal electrical activity in the brain that we could measure, right? It's a very specific pathophysiological phenomenon. Agitated delirium, it's like, yeah, people are aggressive and delirious. And okay, why? Well, there's no one reason. Is there anything about it that's pathognomonic or that's very specific? Or is it just these nonspecific symptoms? Well, it's very nonspecific. Is there anything for any reason why we should think that this is something other than people are just inebriated, right? Or intoxicated and they may become agitated for whatever reason, for a variety of reasons. So just from a purely medical point of view, it has not been clearly established that it exists. Now, that doesn't mean it has no clinical utility. We often use these placeholder diagnoses to describe clinical syndromes that we're still trying to wrap our head around and it just becomes a way of, again, it's like a placeholder so we could talk about it, so we could do research on it, so we could describe it. And you could start to develop a set of knowledge around this concept. But the problem is when you do that, is that these placeholders take on a life of their own. And then people start to think that they're a pathophysiological real entity when it really hasn't been established that they are. That is very much a question. It's like treating a hypothesis like a fact. No, you can't do that. But if you give a really cool sounding name to the hypothesis, it's more likely that people will start treating it like a real thing rather than just a speculation or an idea. So that happens a lot in medicine. It's like chronic fatigue syndrome.

E: Fibromyalgia.

S: Or fibromyalgia, right. It's like, yeah, okay, yeah, there's some reason to have that name to refer to these clinical entities. But is this a specific disease? No, no, it's not. And so the trick is not to confuse one for the other. But excited delirium takes on an entirely new layer because it's not just a medical term and it's not just being looked at from a medical perspective. That law enforcement has hit upon this notion of excited delirium. And now you have non-medical professionals using it in order to explain the behavior of maybe people who have been arrested or are interacting with the police. And so to them, without the medical training to understand that not every label in medicine is created equal, right, some things are placeholders, other things are rock solid diseases. They just treat them all as labels. Oh, this guy has excited delirium. What's excited delirium? You know, and what that has led to in many cases is using excited delirium as an excuse for why somebody may have dropped dead in the custody of police, right? It's like, no, it wasn't the fact that we were beating the crap out of him. It was because he died spontaneously of excited delirium, as if that's a diagnosis.

J: But who would they be saying that to and who would believe it?

E: A judge?

S: Yeah, but that's really exactly right. You know, it sort of, again, it takes on a life of its own. It becomes a thing in the culture, in the law enforcement culture. So it's kind of this pseudo medical label that's been found its way into law enforcement culture and gets used as a too easy diagnosis that then biases the interaction with the person and also gets used as a ready excuse if things go sideways.

E: Yeah, scapegoat.

S: Yeah, so it becomes a scapegoat. Exactly. So that now adds a layer of controversy to it that goes beyond the medical layer of controversy. Now, is there some specific discrete entity that it makes up part of what gets called excited delirium? Maybe. I'm not saying that that's not true. So the other thing that we say in medicine is that this is a quote-unquote garbage pail diagnosis, which means not only is it a placeholder, it's a placeholder that we throw a lot of things into. Anything that's in this realm that we don't have another more valid diagnosis for. And again, it's okay. It's like we have A, B, C, and then everything else that we don't know what it is. And we're going to put that all into this one global category, this garbage pail diagnosis, just so we could conveniently refer to and the rest, you know. And again, that's okay, except that it gets in the hands of a layperson or a non-medical profession who doesn't understand that and they treat it as if it's a real diagnosis. But that also means that you could easily misinterpret the research. So I think chronic fatigue syndrome is a perfect example of this. Chronic fatigue syndrome is a garbage pail diagnosis placeholder for anyone who has chronic fatigue of unknown origin. Fatigue is a maximally nonspecific symptom. It could be caused by a thousand different things. Does everybody who clinically has unexplained chronic fatigue have one disease? No. There's probably a hundred things that are being thrown into that garbage pail. But there may be some unique things that are specific to chronic fatigue syndrome, meaning they don't have another name. They get thrown into the garbage pail with everything else under chronic fatigue syndrome. And then a study gets done that says, hey, these people with chronic fatigue syndrome have Epstein-Barr virus infection. Does that mean that everybody with chronic fatigue syndrome has Epstein-Barr virus infection? No. It's probably only a small percentage. Or, well, we have to figure out what the percentage actually is. Usually we nibble away at these garbage pail diagnoses, here and there. We start to winnow it down to fewer and fewer unknowns. We rarely get rid of them with one stroke. Like we found the one cause of everything we were throwing into this garbage pail. No, it doesn't. It never works that way. And so I think the same is probably true of excited delirium. There may be something going on that we can discover that's happening in this garbage pail. That's a new phenomenon. That doesn't mean that everybody who gets called excited delirium has that thing, or that it's anything other than a nonspecific placeholder garbage pail diagnosis for the time being. We may nibble away at it, but that doesn't change that basic reality. That's a complicated answer because it's a tricky, complicated subject. Absolutely. But unfortunately, there's this, the law enforcement layer is really complicated. And honestly, they should just stop using it. You know, it's too complicated. It's not ready for prime time. You know, it's not ready to be used as a general concept in the hands of non-experts. It's basically a research hypothesis at this point in time. And it's almost certain to be abused if you try to just put it out there in the general public or in a non-medical profession. And that seems to be what happens. Okay, guys, it's time to move on to science or fiction.

B: Oh, boy.

Science or Fiction (1:21:57)

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
'

Rogue	Guess

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Theme: New Tech
Item #1: Hydraloop is a water recycling system for the home that recycles up to 85% of water for reuse

Item #2: Homomorphic encryption is impossible to crack, even with theoretical quantum computers, because the encryption is constantly changing.
Item #3: Helium is a decentralized peer-to-peer wireless network using blockchain and privately owned hotspots that use as much energy as a 12-watt LED but can cover a radius of up to 10 miles

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. The idea is that they're going to use their skeptical radar, their critical thinking skills, and their basic knowledge of science to try to figure out what's wrong with one of these three items. And you are encouraged, you the audience, are encouraged to play along. Now there's a theme this week.

E: Oh, boy.

S: The theme is new tech.

J: All right.

E: New tech.

S: New tech. So these are all things. They're new technology that I didn't know about before today. Before I came across them. I came across a couple of them. And I said, that would be a good theme for science or fiction. And then I looked up more of them. So these are all recent technology that you can get today. Like these exist now.

E: I can purchase it.

S: Well, yeah maybe appropriate context, but they exist. Let me just say that this is not theoretical. It's not whatever. These are things that exist. Okay?

J: Yes.

E: Okay.

S: Item number one. Hydraloop is a water recycling system for the home that recycles up to 85% of water for reuse. Item number two, homomorphic encryption is impossible to crack even with theoretical quantum computers, because the encryption is constantly changing. And I number three, helium is a not the element, but the brand helium is a decentralized peer to peer wireless network using blockchain and privately owned hotspots that use as much energy as a 12 watt LED, but can cover a radius of up to 10 miles. So to clarify, that's one hotspot can cover out to 10 miles. Evan, you weren't here last week, right?

E: I was not.

S: Yeah. So you get to go first.

Evan's Response

E: Hydraloop, a water recycling system for the home recycling up to 85% of water for reuse. Well, this sounds good to me. I like the name. The name is catchy. The name makes sense. It explains what it is. Recycling up to 85% of the water for reuse. Yes, I think so. And maybe someday we will see this in every home across the country and maybe the world. I have no problem with this one at all that this technology exists. The second one, the homomorphic encryption, impossible to crack even with theoretical quantum computers, because the encryption is constantly changing.

S: So obviously, with known technology, because impossible is can change tomorrow. There's no currently known way to crack it is what I mean by that.

E: So if there's no known way to crack it, for some reason, that that's striking as a disconnect for me. I mean, it's like building a lock or a system or something that you can't never you can never open. So what? How is that even possible? Plus the name of this homomorphic encryption. I mean, it sounds like one of those terms that someone would more likely make up than really apply it to something. And because the encryption is constantly changing, well, don't they already have encryption systems that do constantly change already or that regularly change? I might be mixing up some science fiction thinking in my knowledge base here, but I kind of thought that that was already happening to a degree. So this one I'm suspect about. The last one, the helium product wireless network using blockchain, which I happen to just be looking at last night about how blockchain the theory behind how blockchain works because I'm very much a novice in understanding that. But I know a little more about it now. The hotspots, though, and the energy usage is so low and the spread is so wide radius up to 10 miles. While all that seems fantastic in the sense that improbable, I think they've done it proof of concept to the point of a proof of concept and just a matter of how to scale it and roll it out. But I don't see a problem with any of the individual parts of this particular one. So the one I'm having the least warm feeling about is the homomorphic encryption. So therefore, I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Let's see. Hydraloop with the water recycling man. Yeah, it sounds totally totally possible. Makes sense. The helium wireless network peer to peer wireless network using blockchain part of the own hotspots. It uses much radius up to 10 miles. Yeah, I don't know man. I'm it sounds a little sketchy, but I don't think it's a sketchy though. Is that this homomorphic encryption? I mean, what about the keys? What about the what about the keys? I mean, can you change constantly change the encryption, but with the keys still work? I mean, yeah, this could be something that they figured out how to do with the keys would still work. But yeah, that just sounds too sketchy. I'll say that's fiction.

S: And Jay.

Jay's Response

J: Yeah. So the Hydraloop sure I mean, it's a it's a filtration system. I just don't know why right now would people like regular consumers want to buy this because we people are not storing water in their house like they don't have huge tanks of water that they're storing and purifying. I need to learn more about it. But sure, I mean, with today's market, I'm not surprised that a product like that would exist. The homomorphic encryption. I hate when I use this, but this is one of those things like if I don't know about this, then I doubt that anyone has done this yet just because of how much science news I read. But that's being said, I think that if this did happen, it would have been a much bigger deal and and a lot more people would know about. I mean, I'm leaning towards this one. The decentralized, the third one, the helium, which is the decentralized peer-to-peer. I have no reason to disbelieve that either because using a blockchain and a lot of different technologies is starting to happen. Blockchain is very powerful, interesting technology, and I'm not surprised to hear that people would be wanting to do it. Use that security with with the hot spots and Wi-Fi type systems. So I'll go with the guys and say that the homomorphic encryption thing is just probably not there yet.

E: Okay, cool.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Alright, so I guess we'll take these in order. The first one is Hydroloop is a water recycling system for the home that recycles up to 85% of water for reuse. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

E: Yeah.

S: So it creates gray water like you can't drink it.

E: Non-potable.

S: Yeah. So it will take like the water you use in your shower, in your washing machine, all that stuff. It'll recycle it. It'll purify it and then you could use it again like in your shower or your washing machine. So that's why it's 85%. I guess the 15% is the stuff that you drink and cook with. Yeah. And it makes sense. The the price I found for a system. You know, I'm assuming this is like a typical home. How much do you think it costs?

E: 25,000.

J: 15 grand.

S: 4,000.

E: Oh, wow.

S: So 4,000 still it's still a pretty big price tag for a lot of people but if you pay for your water like if you're on city water and you get a water bill every month your water bill would be reduced by 85% so you could figure out how much that would save you and how long it would take to recuperate the cost. You know it might not be unreasonable for a lot of people and this is good because it reduces the demand on our potable water or on our freshwater system. This is only going to get more intense as population increases and technology increases and are we making more food and all that kind of stuff we need more water and so if it became pretty standard for homes to recycle 85% of the water right where they use it in the home and this isn't limited to residential. This could be commercial as well like hotels could use this and businesses can use this uh as well. Obviously they need they would need scaled up systems but they exist. You could get you could buy this right now if you want it.

E: Moonbase Alpha will have some of these no doubt.

S: Yeah obviously this is going to, absolutely any kind of-

B: Oh my god.

S: -self-sustaining moon base or even space station or anything. I was just reading about that not too not too long ago. You know like obviously the ISS is completely dependent on resupply from Earth but the goal in we'll probably talk about this to the NASA guys that we're interviewing for NECSS is the goal is to get space stations and moon bases and Mars bases that are self-sufficient. That recycle 100% of what they do. As long as you have energy and you start with the raw material that you need. You could make energy to grow plants to recycle the oxygen to make oxygen and bind the CO2. You know it's like like a little what do you call this terrarium? Where you have a self-contained little ecosystem. Yeah. It's perfectly feasible then you just have to top things off. You know rather than completely replace everything that they need. Yeah. So this this I think probably a lot of this technology comes from that.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Let's go to number two homomorphic encryption is impossible to crack even with theoretical quantum computers because the encryption is constantly changing or morphing one might say. You guys all think this one is the fiction and this one is the fiction.

B: Yay.

J: Sweet.

S: Here's the thing guys homomorphic encryption is real. I just made up a fake definition for it. So what do you think it is? It's actually pretty darn cool.

E: Well homo same morphic is changing same changing encryption. So it's like a illusion of some sort that's like a change but not change.

S: Yeah. This is interesting. I've never even thought of this idea. so it's encryption that allows you to do processing of the data without decrypting it. So in other words, you can share encrypted data with someone else who can run it through an algorithm or do what they gotta do to it. They can do analysis of it come up with a result without ever decrypting and therefore without ever having access to the information itself. So you could share encrypted data without decrypting it, without revealing the information.

B: But how could you manipulate the encrypted data without some level of-

S: That's homomorphic encryption. That's what exactly what it does. It just figures out a way to manipulate the data without decrypting it while maintaining the encryption.

B: That sounds like a security risk though.

S: Yeah, but that's what they claim that that's what it does. The whole point is to reduce the security risk because you don't have to decrypt data in order to like source the analysis.

E: Never reveals itself in the way.

S: Yeah. Look it up homomorphic encryption. Yeah. I hadn't heard it before, but yeah, I was just going off of the morphic, you know with the changing and I was hoping one of you heard of the term, but didn't remember what it was that could have been a good get you, but no.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Alright, which means that Helium is a decentralized peer-to-peer wireless network using blockchain and privately owned hotspots that use as much energy as a twelve watt LED, which is not much at all, but can cover a radius of up to 10 miles. They say basically like 5 to 10 miles is a good good guideline. So I left out some data here. I left out one really big thing that makes this sound more impressive than it is.

J: What is it?

S: What you think it is?

B: It works up to a radius of 10 miles for a nanosecond.

E: So you're limited.

S: It's very low throughput. It's very very-

B: The bandwidth is shit. Okay.

J: Who cares about that then? No thanks.

E: Bucket cold water Jay throw.

S: It's the purpose of it. So this is not for downloading movies on the internet. That's not what this is for. This is for the internet of things. That's what this is.

J: I got you. Okay. It makes sense.

B: Yeah.

S: Yes, exactly.

B: Your toaster doesn't need a lot of throughput. A lot of bandwidth.

S: Exactly. It's just when you need tiny little bits of data, but you need them on a really long distance. So this uses the LORAWAN protocol, which is a it's a low frequency, a low, is it frequency? No a low powered radio wide area network. So it's very low powered but very wide area and it uses radio frequency. So again that so that's the LORAWAN or I guess you might say the LORAWAN protocol. The helium is the is just one brand that uses this technology and they have their own at their end. They're the ones who are using blockchain and whatever in order to use the LORAWAN protocol in order to have their internet of things. So you could, for example, here's the thing that they did. If you you could buy a personal hotspot $495. So yeah, so basically 500 bucks you get a hotspot, but now you own it. So this is a decentralized. It's like nobody owns this, everyone owns their own their own hotspot. It's kind of like Bitcoin in that way where there's no owner like Helium doesn't own the network. The network is completely public, but if you contribute to this public network by buying a $500 hotspot and plugging it into your house, you know how they pay you? Or how they reward you I should say. You get a reward. You get paid in Helium cryptocurrency.

E: You gotta have your own cryptocurrency.

S: That's their method for mining their crypto their helium cryptocurrency.

B: Does it give you a high voice?

S: So here's the first killer app for it, which I think is actually really good and I would consider getting it. Is you could buy these Helium tags and then you can put them on anything and you can use the helium network to know where it is with as long as it's within 10 miles of the hotspot. So of course if you have a hotspot in your house, you would know if it's within 10 miles of your home. So for example, you could put it on your pets tag like your dog tag.

E: Oh interesting.

S: Yeah, and then you could know exactly where your dog is no matter where it is as long as it's within 10 miles of a hotspot and again if you have a hotspot within 10 miles of your home. Or you could put it on your laptop or your cell phone or whatever. So a way of-

E: Car keays.

S: -tracking expensive or precious or whatever items, but again, that's just one. That's just one application of the Helium network. They're working on other ones, but that's a good one to start with. You know, I think that's a really good application of this, but again it shows you like it just needs to be able to send out a ping. It doesn't need to like download a movie. So that's why the it's it's sacrifices throughput for range because range is the key because it's just an Internet of things application. So I wonder where it's going to go like with these sorts of things like sometimes the technology comes first and the applications come later. It's looking for the killer app and if it if somebody company finds the killer app, then it takes off and if it doesn't, it dies on the vine. So we'll see where it goes, but it was it got my interest. I was interested in that.

B: Yeah.

S: What do you guys think? What do you think Jay?

J: I think it's awesome if they could do it. You know what I mean?

E: Well, proof of concept says yeah.

J: I mean even with the proof of concept. I mean will it scale blah blah blah. There's so much so much to it.

S: Yeah. It's built to scale. It's sort of a one to many peer to peer network and it already is pretty large. Actually, it's been growing pretty large and it just incrementally can continue to increase everybody every time somebody buys another access point, it enlarges the network.

J: Did they did you read anything about security Steve?

S: Yes, I did. Security is built in from the get go. It's sort of like wired into the software. So it's baked in at the ground floor of how it functions. It's not like another layer of security. Security is baked into the way it works. Yeah. So they talk a lot about that. That's supposed to be a big selling point. Now again, I don't have the technical savvy to know how effective that is. The reviews I've read said it's good, that that's a good thing about the network. Of course, until it gets used enough that somebody wants to hack it, we won't know, but it's security was is built in. It's not an add on or an afterthought, which I like, building a network from the ground up where security was part of the process from day one.

E: And isn't security part of the whole blockchain concept. In other words, it is inherently much more difficult to grab something that's blockchain as opposed to not.

S: Yeah. Apparently that's that's part of it as well. And also decentralized and all that sort of stuff. And apparently the Helium cryptocurrency has increased in value tenfold since December and I know that cryptocurrencies are like the latest fad now. I don't know if we would say there's a cryptocurrency bubble. I don't know. It's I don't think anybody knows because it's such a vaporous thing. You know what I mean?

E: It's belief system in a way.

S: A bubble is technically when the speculative value of something greatly exceeds its inherent value, right? It's like if you evaluate a company based on its hard assets, but then people are elevating the stock because they think it's going to increase in value. There's speculative value. That's a bubble, right? And that's why bubbles pop and collapse. They go back down to the actual value of the stock. But with cryptocurrency, there is no actual value. It's all speculative value, right? It's all entirely based on what people think they were willing to pay for it and so I don't know what would the what would a cryptocurrency bubble even be like? What would that look like? I don't know. I read an interesting article not to get too off on cryptocurrency. I know we've talked about it a little bit before but the inherent problem they're having now is they kind of like doesn't know if it wants to be a currency or an investment and the problem is those might be mutually exclusive when you think about it because as an investment, you want it to be volatile, right? But as a currency, you don't want it to be volatile but apparently, if people start using it as a currency, it makes it a better investment but that which makes it a worse currency. Which makes it a worse investment. Yeah, so it's kind of stuck in that. So, like with Bitcoin, the Bitcoin jumped because Tesla said that you could buy a Tesla car with Bitcoin and then they said, never mind. We're not going to we're not going to accept Bitcoin for Tesla cars because it takes up too much energy as if they just discovered that.

B: Yeah, right.

S: But what they discovered was it makes no sense to allow somebody to pay in a currency that's highly volatile and so when they stopped accepting Bitcoin, Bitcoin, of course, the price of Bitcoin dropped like by 10% or something. But anyway, so it's complicated and I don't know that anybody really can predict like what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency market. It's very very difficult but there's certainly a lot of potential there, as an investment. Will it ever be a stable currency? Who knows? You know, that's the thing. I don't think anybody can predict at this point. And most people I think are more using it as an investment than a currency.

J: Yeah, without a doubt.

S: Yeah, which of course, if you get in on the ground floor of the right cryptocurrency at the right time, yeah, you can make a killing but you're but it could also evaporate cuz again, it's nothing. Like Dogecoin dropped like plummeted because of a side comment that Elon Musk jokingly said on Saturday Live.

E: Yeah, right. That's not very stable.

J: I mean, right now, Bitcoin and Ethereum are way down because the company accidentally paid I guess some of its employees in Bitcoins instead of dollars. So.

S: Accidentally? How does that happen?

J: They accidentally sent people like hundreds of Bitcoins as a bonus or whatever.

E: It's a lot.

J: Yeah, and then those people dumped all that Bitcoin and the market dropped significantly.

E: Oh, I see.

J: So, yeah, there's crazy things like that that can happen that would have a massive impact on the on the value.

E: Yeah. And you get some savvy manipulators in there and. You know, real shark speculators. They could absolutely do a lot of damage with with something like that.

B: Savvy.

S: You're basically gambling at this point.

E: Yeah, it's a form.

S: If you invest in it.

E: That's right.

S: Alright, but the SGU does not give financial or investing advice. So, you can ignore everything we just said.

E: Consult your own.

S: Yes, consult your financial advisor. Okay. So, good job guys.

B: Thank you.

E: Yeah.

J: Thank you.

E: That was fun.

S: Sniffed out. Homomorphic encryption.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:44:39)

If each of us communicate science to our favorite adjacent audience, we can bring science into everything, because at the end of the day, everything is adjacent to science.
– Pamela Gay (1973-), an American astronomer, educator, podcaster, and writer, best known for her work in astronomical podcasting and citizen science astronomy projects

S: Alright, Evan, you got a quote for us?

E: I do. "If each of us communicate science to our favorite adjacent audience, we can bring science into everything because at the end of the day, everything is adjacent to science." And that was said by Pamela Gay.

B: Yeah, Pamela.

S: Yeah, very nice.

E: It's part of an interview she gave in 2017 when they were asking her a question about science popularization and how to improve science popularization and she brought up the point where well, she in her case likes to explain the science of science fiction to science to other people who like science fiction. That's her way of doing it and that's the adjacent audience she's talking about in that context.

S: Yeah, we do a lot of that as well.

E: Absolutely.

S: Yeah, it's a good idea and I heartily endorse it. Alright, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: You got it, brother.

B: Sure man.

E: Thank you, Steve.

S: We'll see you guys at the Friday live stream.

Signoff

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

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

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Today I Learned

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Notes

== References ==

Vocabulary