SIO438: That's Absurd Please Elaborate

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 438. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and do I have a fun one for you today. Going to be speaking with Trace and Julien from That's Absurd, Please Elaborate, an incredibly cool show that takes possibly strange questions and figures out the science behind them. It's really cool.

They're going tell us more about it, but I wanted to have them on the chat, not just because they're fun, they're funny, they're science people, all that, but also because I, science communication is so critical right now.

I mean, we saw what the pandemic did, we saw life toll of science denialism and misinformation, and I think it's more important than ever to try to talk about science and communicate science in a way that increases increases confidence in it, that lets people in, that's accessible, all that stuff. It's a fun conversation, been a really great time, so looking forward to that. As usual, please go to patreon.com/seriouspod to support the show.

It is very important, show only continues on with the generous support of patrons like maybe you listening, most importantly, you don't have to hear the ads. One, there's bonus stuff. There's Seriously Awful Movies, is that monthly hangout that we're now going to do at the beginning of every month because it was very silly of us to add to our end of month workload with that. That is so much fun. I can't wait to do that one when I'm not so stressed out.

Group has grown every month and it's super fun. All good reasons to check out patreon.com/seriouspod. Thanks so much to the patrons who support the show, and now it's time to get to the interview, right after this. Trace and Julian, welcome to the show. So nice to have you.

0:01:54 Trace: Thanks.

0:01:56 Thomas: And I met now. Gosh, when the hell was that? I don't have any sense of time, but it was a while ago.

0:01:55 Julian: Be here

0:01:59 Trace: It was like last summer, I think. It was hot. I remember it was hot, right?

0:02:01 Thomas: Yeah. So whenever it was hot in Sacramento, California, that narrows it down to an 11 and a half month range of the year.

0:02:11 Trace: Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't February.

0:02:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, and I super impressed by both your experience and your speaking and everything. Julian, I don't know who the fuck you are, so you're going to have an impression.

0:02:20 Julian: You I get that a lot as as trace's kind of vestigial appendage yeah like Like, I am another science communicator. I worked with Trace for close to a decade for Discovery Digital's DNews and then later Seeker YouTube channel, just writing and hosting quick, snappy videos about science topics. And now whenever Trace and I appear together, Trace knows everybody and I tag along, and I hope make a favorable impression, but I don't know, everybody still seems to contact Trace first, not that I'm bitter, it's

0:02:27 Trace: Oh, stop it.

0:02:54 Thomas: Such

0:02:55 Trace: Well, email is easier to remember, I

0:02:58 Julian: True, it's truth. Mine's good, my last name is Huget, so it's, it's Julianette, you get what you pay for. And now I'm gonna get a lot of emails from listeners now, they're gonna

0:02:58 Trace: Think.

0:03:07 Trace: Yeah, you're going to get emails now. It really is.

0:03:08 Thomas: A boomer joke. Everybody, I feel like all the all the boomers had like a joke for their name of like, and that's how you remember the whatever, but I just got stuck on they tried to call something D News, which just feels like either young and or potentially had been involved, I just feel like that would be, I would want to get my D News, as you know, if

0:03:18 Trace: Yeah. Oh, oh, Thomas,

0:03:19 Julian: It's Yeah, yeah, I was stoked when I was offered a job and I showed up on day one and they're like, like, we're a science channel. And I was like, oh, yeah.

0:03:27 Trace: You just wait. They. I was like, put on some clothes, Julian, get your pants on. This is a semi -professional work environment. You should, but see, guys, you don't, you don't get to go to the internal corporate meetings where they talked about the sensation that they were going to launch in Europe. Dplay.

0:03:33 Thomas: Oh, I wore the wrong outfit, oh, boy.

0:03:52 Trace: This is a real product. And everyone in the audience, all of us that worked on the internet, we're just like, I'm sorry, what? You're launching what now?

0:03:54 Thomas: D play. Okay.

0:04:00 Trace: You're gonna put a product out there called D Play? I

0:04:04 Julian: I did not know about this.

0:04:06 Trace: Don't know if it ever launched, if it did, oh my God, it was great, it was basically half the room just went like, immediately it was great.

0:04:13 Julian: That's funny. Uh,

0:04:09 Thomas: That's fantastic, uh, that's excellent, and That's are the best meetings.

0:04:18 Trace: Yeah,

0:04:19 Julian: Couldn't, like, get D Play up? You think, like, the more you play with it, you know, yeah, do

0:04:27 Thomas: Things.

0:04:21 Trace: They really tried to get D Play, you know, to be a thing. And you know, the best part about D Play, with your friends you can D Play at home, you can play on your computer, you can Dplay on any device, it was really multi -platform, Dplay, oh, no,

0:04:30 Julian: You play by yourself,

0:04:33 Thomas: Oh, good times. Well, that's what we're here to do today. Some deep play with my two science buds, Trace and Julian. No, I was really impressed by your show and it's, it's a fun idea. And I thought we'd have a fun fun conversation about science communication. I'm at a phase right now. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to release these episodes of where there's woke yet, but I'm to the point where I don't even, I don't even know if I believe in science. Like, I'm just like, I feel like I'm, so maybe you guys can talk me off a ledge.

No, when I see people doing misleading science, especially around specifically areas, and this is not at all to diminish these fields, but like psychology and other fields where you can point to like a, there's you a 0 .3 correlation of something. And then people just talk about that as though that means every this thing is that that thing, you know? And I, I I read a whole bunch of that and listened to a whole bunch of Jordan Peterson making those very terrible claims about a particular thing. And I started to get really, you know, just depressed on science in general. And so maybe you guys can, can cheer me up. Let's talk about communicating science and some of the challenges. So first you should tell people about the concept of your show and, uh, you know what it is. I

0:05:01 Trace: Yeah, yep, oh,

0:05:06 Julian: Yeah, right, uh, sure, Uh, so we host a podcast together called That's Absurd, Please Elaborate. So I guess it's, it's the, uh, like yin to Serious Inquiries Only yang, you know, like, literally the premise is, uh, take listener questions, that the sillier, the weirder, the better, you know, they've got to make some sort of sense, it can't be like, why is blue, because ice cream has no bones, or whatever, like that doesn't yeah,

0:06:06 Thomas: Know that easy one.

0:06:06 Trace: I'd I'd still try to answer that, yeah, for sure, yes,

0:06:08 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:07 Julian: Um, you know, usually it's like, oh, could, uh, actually, you know, somehow evolve in some ways, things like that, uh, and then, then we explore like, okay, what does actual research have to say about this? Based on the 10 years that Trace and I have been making videos and learning a whole lot about all these different fields, how can we apply that knowledge to this question and get maybe not the perfect answer, but you'll learn something along the way that's real and concrete, that maybe otherwise you wouldn't have even been interested in at all, um, we definitely hear you in that sense of, like, you know, the great thing about the internet and the terrible thing about the internet is how it's democratized making content. And I was really frustrated the other day because I was skimming through, like, other science podcasts for people to reach out to and say, like, oh, come on our show, you know, you're an expert or something, and there are these things labeled science that just aren't,

0:06:17 Thomas: Science adjacent though, or science. Yeah, Yeah. Okay.

0:06:19 Trace: Yeah, yeah, wow,

0:07:10 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:10 Julian: You know, like, there's... there's a a Sasquatch Chronicles podcast that's in the science category, it's weekly, and it's got like news, like the latest news on sas quash and I'm like, is that enough to make a weekly show? I don't know, still yeah, still

0:07:18 Trace: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

0:07:24 Thomas: I was going to say, unless the podcast is just them saying still doesn't exist every single time, because that's science, you know, that could be solid science.

0:07:31 Trace: Honestly, Honestly, that would be a great that would listen to that podcast.

0:07:33 Julian: No, No evidence, right? Like, The The Real Scientific

0:07:37 Trace: Let me tell you.

0:07:37 Julian: Approach Would Would be...

0:07:37 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Here's our new spinoff podcast. The three of us, we get every mythical monster like that. And we do like all the science there is to know about Bigfoot and then, or whatever we pick all, you now, Nessie, we pick all the different things. And then each episode is just a different one of those where we go, so doesn't exist but we will let you know like we are monitoring the science on this

0:07:42 Trace: Yeah.

0:07:57 Trace: Thanks for listening.

0:07:46 Julian: Yeah. Still... Yeah. Yeah. We are open to, you know, evidence, right? Like, that's key.

0:07:59 Thomas: Yeah

0:08:03 Trace: Is the podcast version of that old Twitter account that was just Big Ben. And so every hour it would tweet bong. Like is that is this the podcast version of that we're just like new week uh no update for that week either uh thanks see ya

0:08:09 Julian: Oh, so good.

0:08:12 Thomas: Yeah that's science or it's just ladies and gentlemen the weekend you know and then that's that's yeah it's

0:08:20 Julian: Yeah, or... So there's those kind of shows. You mentioned Jordan Peterson. He's one of the top quote unquote science podcasts. And a lot of what he does is like abuse and misuse, you vague notions of what people think science is to bash like transgender people, you you know?

0:08:37 Trace: Yeah yes yeah

0:08:37 Thomas: So bad it's så bad I again these episodes are pending on where there's woke but it's so much worse than you could possibly imagine because that guy was assigned like he was as a scientist, like he he he is published, you know, and then he talks about things like if you find any correlation with like, well, some of these folks who have this political view tend to be a little bit more open and then we'll talk as though that's 100 percent correlation and then make like four other steps along the chain and all talk as though those are 100 percent correlations when, you know, by the time you multiply out a few weak correlations, you're at like nothing, you know, and it's so frustrating, not exactly what what your show deals with, but just that spirit of actual accurate science, you know, versus that bullshit, whatever that is.

0:08:48 Trace: Yes yes yeah yeah yes yeah absolutely

0:08:52 Julian: Yeah.

0:09:20 Julian: I, think you're getting to the root of something important, though, which is beyond just communicating, like, here's some fun facts about some interesting things, like of our job, too, is reinforcing what science is and how like good science is done and and like arming listeners with like and tools to like interrogate information. And we try and build that in when we're telling a story, too. Like, talked for a long time. Tresha, talk now.

0:09:50 Thomas: What

0:09:48 Trace: Yeah no I I mean, I think that, I think that makes total sense, that's basically, so we just recorded an episode today that, one, one of the questions Julian mentioned about, you know, could a vampire evolve in real life? And Julian went through all the different thought processes to kind of like, OK, well, it would have to have lots of these characteristics. And then what would give rise to those in the environment? Because science, as you likely know, it's just a way of thinking. And really funny. So I have a toddler. And so we watch a lot of Sesame Street. And there's a thing in Sesame Street where they go, I wonder, what if, let's

0:09:50 Thomas: If, yeah, we

0:10:25 Trace: Try.

0:10:26 Thomas: Do that too with the kids. Yeah.

0:10:27 Trace: Yeah, that is the scientific method. That is all it is. It's, I wonder, so did animals evolve from this other thing? What if they did? Let's test it out. And then they just do that over and over and over again. And so the first time I saw that, I was like, holy shit, they're doing the scientific method on Sesame Street. They just aren't calling it that. And that's really all it it is it's it's just asking a question testing that question and trying it again and again.

0:10:29 Thomas: Yeah, it's the best. No one's a better scientist than little kid. They're just such natural scientists. It's not a cliche. They really are. They just ask all these and they're, they are the best scientists because they ask questions that you would never think of in a million fucking years. Like they've, that is my favorite part. I know we talked about it when we were on that panel, Trace, and it's genuinely a passion of mine, I guess, I don't get to talk about enough, which is like just that joyful experience of you very quickly as a human take a bunch of stuff for granted and then you, if you're someone who has kids, you bring a new, like, default blank slate-ish being into the world and they're like, wait a minute, what the fuck is this? I'll hopefully don't say it.

0:10:58 Trace: No, they really are. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

0:11:25 Julian: Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:31 Thomas: My kids, you know, they're pirates. They're sailors rather. They got bad language and tattoos, but yeah,

0:11:36 Trace: They're like dad dad the fuck the fuck dad, why

0:11:37 Julian: Well, you little kid might interrogate like, wait, you're telling me this word is bad? Why is this one bad? And then you struggle as an adult to be like, well, great question.

0:11:43 Thomas: Exactly. Yeah.

0:11:44 Trace: Is it bad, you're uh, because people some say

0:11:50 Julian: And you have to re -examine these assumptions that you use to simplify your world, but sometimes they can steer you in bad directions. I hate to keep bringing them up, but Jordan, a lot of these talking heads that talk about like, oh, there's two genders. And it's like, yeah, we think that way because it's simple and it's what we're used to, but, like, going that assumption and recognizing that there are other identities that are like equally valid is difficult for people because you have to break that initial assumption that you're just operating on to save basically late effort.

0:11:51 Trace: Bad thing, maybe, yeah.

0:11:59 Thomas: Yeah,

0:12:11 Trace: Yeah,

0:12:27 Thomas: A good point because as much as kids are natural scientists, they actually also are natural. I could have made a joke and said racist, but they're natural

0:12:32 Julian: Right,

0:12:34 Trace: You're not wrong, though. You're not wrong. Yes, they

0:12:35 Thomas: Gender essentialists. They actually really are because they very quickly, Very quickly, um, they latch on to like, okay, that toy's pink, it's a girl toy, that person has longer hair, they're a girl. And, like, it happens instantly. Like, absolutely instantly. There's nothing scientific about it, there's not. I think that the key, though, is, yeah, there are patterns in the world, nothing wrong to recognize patterns, but it's also very easy to say those don't always hold up, you know. And but kids have a hard time with that.

I once had, sorry to keep going, but I'm just remembering, remembering, I, I once had an argument with my toddler, like Phoebe was, we were at, let's see, we're at a last house. She would have been, you know, barely talking. And there was a guy with his baby who had long hair and we only saw him from behind, but I kind of knew, I kind of recognized him or I, some way I knew it was a boy. And I was like, I don't know, I knew it. It actually, in her defense, it did look like, you know, this person could have been a woman from behind. But I

0:12:47 Trace: Are. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yes, yeah, mm, -hm, yeah, yeah,

0:12:49 Julian: Well, right,

0:13:28 Thomas: Knew he was a guy. And she said, oh, look at that mommy over there doing the whatever. I was like, oh actually that's, you you know, that's just a boy who has long hair. You know, you try to explain these exceptions to them, you know? And she was not fucking having it. Like I, it was, she's like, no, he, she has long hair! I was like, yeah, no I know, but like sometimes, you know, people can have long hair, I know. And she's like, it's like no, it was unacceptable to her. It is a bit of a challenge.

0:13:39 Trace: No, that's a mommy, Tommy. Yeah. Anybody can have long hair. Yeah, yeah.

0:13:54 Julian: But These, these gender notions, though, are things that we ingrain on our children, like, literally from birth, right? Like, when they're being sorted at the hospital and we're putting them in like pink or blue or whatever, and then, like, they're absorbing, like, sponges, the world around them before they can even talk, and they see that, like, oh, there's these things, mom's got long hair, dad's got short hair, you know, so Like These are, again, assumptions that we are kind of already, without even realizing we're doing it, putting into our children, and then we're just getting that back out again from them.

0:13:54 Trace: It's Mm hmm.

0:14:27 Trace: Yeah Absolutely. I mean, I think I like the gender argument, and people are like, well, there's only two genders, and I'm like, yeah, there's also only two types of trees. You know, there's deciduous trees and there's evergreens. That's it. There's no nuance whatsoever. You're right. It just like that does not exist in any other scenario. So why would it exist in our biological scenario? So to kind of bring it back around to science communication. That's what I think of when I think of science communication, right? If people believe something, we're not here to tell them otherwise. We're here, as Julian said, to make them interrogate similar to what we're talking about. Why the way a kid would, you know, to think about it in a slightly different way so that they maybe challenge themselves and ask those questions for themselves. It's like, well, you're right. We We do divide trees into these two different types of tree. So what's a cactus? Does it fit in? No,

0:14:28 Thomas: Yeah. Ah, Ah,

0:14:37 Julian: No.

0:15:18 Trace: It doesn't.

0:15:18 Thomas: Shit.

0:15:18 Trace: What Yeah, it's a sandwich. Exactly. I We did an episode about that where I brought up the hot dog is a sandwich argument.

0:15:19 Thomas: It's a sandwich, right? Yeah.

0:15:28 Trace: And I said, I

0:15:28 Thomas: Hold on. Stop everything. What is a fucking cactus? Now I'm doubting myself. Is it a fungus? I don't know. It's an entirely different being.

0:15:33 Trace: Think, I guess probably a shrub. It might be a shrob.

0:15:37 Thomas: Yeah. Wow.

0:15:38 Julian: It's A plant, it's, if you want to really know, it's it's

0:15:39 Trace: I mean, it'S a plant. Yes, it' s a plant, Julian.

0:15:41 Thomas: Everything's a plant.

0:15:41 Julian: No, no, it's not. Everything's not a plant. Not, no, you, you, sir, you're an animal. There's animals, plants, and fungi, those are the three, like, kingdoms, right? Um, and so plants, but then you can split plants based on, like, the photosynthesis they do, and cactuses are CAM plants.

0:15:43 Thomas: I'm a plant! Oh, okay, I'm

0:15:48 Trace: Yeah,

0:15:58 Thomas: Like How pointy they are, is that one of the categories? No, sorry, Trace, I interrupted your line of thought, yeah.

0:16:01 Trace: Yeah, no, that's Fine, Julian's gonna start breaking down kingdom, phylum, class, and get us all the way to what a cactus is if we're not careful. So

0:16:08 Julian: Yeah, if yeah, if you poke me enough, if it's, if I'm feeling prickly.

0:16:14 Trace: But yeah, I, that's, mean, sort of what we try to do in our podcast. We just disguise it with, like, humor and storytelling to try and get people interested to go look it up themselves and when they have questions, because it's like, if we can tell you, I don't know whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which, spoiler alert, the answer for, for my podcast, my answer rather was, sure, why not, like, What does it matter, all of this is made up, like, we made up all of this. So the idea of a sandwich is not, like, ingrained in the freaking, you, physics of the universe. It's just a decision made at one point, so why can't we unmake it? Oh, that's great, and

0:16:14 Julian: Yes, um, this is a matter. Mm, -hmm.

0:16:41 Thomas: Okay, Well, you're gonna get a lot of argument from my audience, you know, this is I, written in the code of the universe what a sandwich is, and, uh, you're wrong about that one, but hey, guys, they're right about a lot other stuff, so you should still listen, listen to them.

0:16:58 Julian: You imagine they get to the center of a black hole, and, like, decrypt, like, what's there, like, the information coming out of it, and Hawking radiation, and it's like a hot dog is a sandwich.

0:17:12 Trace: There's exactly,

0:17:12 Thomas: But it is, it is actually interesting. Not only is there a bunch of philosophy in that question, that's a fun one to like, That just is a very fun one to start like, oh, ha ha. And then very quickly you can get to like. Oh crap. I thought this was going to be easy. And it's actually not as easy as I thought it would be. It's not only has implications for philosophy, but I actually think also it has implications for how we just just categorize everything in general. And especially when it comes to evolution, you know, my, actually just yesterday, the day before Phoebe, my daughter, she's now six. I almost said five. Sorry. My son is five. No, my son's turning five. This is a disaster. Edit this whole thing out. She's six.

0:17:12 Julian: Yeah. Yes. Yes!

0:17:36 Trace: Yeah, yeah,

0:17:48 Thomas: And she was asking, cause I've tried to talk to her about evolution. You know, I have a plan to see early about actual science, you Know, and I'm like, yeah, we're were related to. And I don't do the thing of like, yeah, we came from monkeys. Cause that already, you know, like I try to set it up, right? Like, yeah. No, we were, we evolved from something that was like related to chimpanzees in this way and such. And she instantly simplified that to we're monkeys. So it didn't matter. My, it went, this was a while ago. So she came back with the conversation. She's like, Hey, are we monkeys? Like if you go, when was the first first person. Like when did it turn from person to monkey?

0:18:03 Trace: Yeah,

0:18:11 Julian: Right, right.

0:18:12 Trace: Great, question.

0:18:21 Thomas: And I was like, Oh, you a a Because, and so I tried to tell her, I was Like, okay, it's, it'S so many, you know, generations and generations. And I do remember something, I think maybe Richard Dawkins might have said this at some point, but it's something that stuck with me. That was really interesting where if we had every single being that ever lived alive at once, somehow like in a just just massive infinite planet, you wouldn't really be able to divide stuff up into like anything because everything would be a slight variation of everything else. And it would be really hard to find, there's no time when like, okay, this turned into this different kind of animal. If you had every single, you of the lineage alive at once, it's really fascinating to think about. And so hot dogs and sandwiches, I think it ties it together. Gonna

0:18:22 Trace: Yeah, right, yeah, yeah,

0:18:22 Julian: Yes, yes, yes.

0:19:05 Julian: Glad you went there, because that's exactly what I wanted to talk about, you know, about evolution or talking about, like, categorization in general, right? Is, is, because it is so arbitrary, I was having a discussion with somebody the day who was very skeptical of science because they were like, what, so Pluto's not a planet? Like, what? And I'm like, no, Pluto didn't change, but our understanding of the solar system changed. Like, we found more things that were kind of roughly like Pluto.

0:19:33 Thomas: Well, plus, it was behind on its planet dues.

0:19:35 Julian: It was, yeah, out of the club.

0:19:26 Trace: Yes, yeah, it just, wasn't keeping up It let

0:19:35 Thomas: It just wasn't paying so, yeah,

0:19:39 Julian: Out,

0:19:39 Trace: Its lawn grow really long. And we kept sending it letters, and it just wouldn't.

0:19:40 Thomas: Yeah,

0:19:40 Julian: You know. Getting people to understand that, like, science is iterative and, you is imperfect and changing and getting better and better, but it's asymptotic. You know, It can't be perfect.

0:19:54 Trace: Yeah. Ooh, good word.

0:19:56 Julian: Thank you, um, evolution's a very similar, uh, with categorization and like what is a species exactly, and there's multiple definitions and you faith actors, no pun intended, will use that ambiguity and that imperfection to point at it and go like, "They have no idea." You know, like, "My explanation that things were just created a certain way is much simpler and more concrete and therefore better." And it's like, no, no, cause you don't have like data or experimental evidence.

0:20:06 Trace: Yeah, there's no evidence to support that. Yeah you're just saying that that's it. You're not backing it up with anything other than yeah but that's what I said. But yeah,

0:20:29 Julian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I'm so glad that you went there because that's exactly the sort of thing that we transition into of like, Hey, you can see this, this, analogy with other things like in science and our understanding and see that like, okay, yeah, yeah, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, when does the first chicken happen? You know?

0:20:54 Trace: That's I love that question. From like a, I, when like I go do talks that students run, you know, either colleges or high schools or whatever. I like bring that up if want to talk about evolution. Is like the chicken or the egg is a great philosophical question with no real answer, but an evolutionary biologist might tell you, well, there is an answer. It was likely something that wasn't a chicken birthed a chicken or something more chicken like than itself. And then slowly over millions of years, and it's just not satisfying to get that answer because chicken or the egg, you a binary answer because it's a binary question.

0:21:17 Julian: Yeah. Yeah.

0:21:22 Thomas: Yeah. Right.

0:21:30 Trace: But that's not how science works or even how the universe works. I also like the analogy of when you put on one side red and the other side orange and do a gradient between them, when is it not orange or red anymore? Like, When do you decide where red ends and orange begins? That's how life works. Like, there is no, okay, it was red now, it's orange, until we start drawing boxes around things. And we do that because, you know, heuristics, because heurastics are important, the mental shortcuts. But heurantics also have problems, you now.

Know, if you had to rethink everything, great example, the firefighter, the firefighter goes into a house every, you know, every day, hopefully not every day if you have a lot of fires, I guess, but you know you go into the house often enough that you get this sense as a firefighter of when there's going to be a backdraft or when the house is going to collapse in some places or when things are getting precarious and that's a heuristic that you learn because of doing it again and again and you couldn't just like go through your academic textbook book every time you're standing in a burning building and be like, well, based on the current temperature and the amount of time spent burning, then we should calculate whether or not the house is going to like, you just feel it.

It's this unconscious heuristic. And that's what people prefer to do because it's easy. And that's why a lot of people mess up on their science because they're just like, well, my heuristics says it's this. And I feel like that is what it is based on my experience. And then it's almost never that because you don't want to go through the whole process every time it's really hard science.

0:21:43 Thomas: I And the, um, the other message of Sesame Street that I use all the time is, what do we do when we don't know something, Trace? Look It Up.

0:23:06 Trace: Look it Up. Yeah.

0:23:07 Thomas: This is what We are As parents.

0:23:08 Trace: That's Right. Oh.

0:23:09 Thomas: This is And That one is my favorite. And I'm glad it doesn't say, like, we, you check YouTube for whichever conspiracy theorist on it. You know, I it is important. You message, I think, needs to be also modified to include a heavy dose of what what is good looking up versus bad looking up.

0:23:09 Trace: Yeah. It's true.

0:23:18 Julian: Yes.

0:23:26 Trace: Yeah.

0:23:26 Thomas: But I do love that we live in an age where you can just look whatever up. I have long wondered what that was going to do, to you society and people thought it would make us smarter and it clearly hasn't, but it also increases the potential, you know, in some ways. And it's interesting to think about our kids being brought up in a world where they literally can just look anything up. And it's, it's also interesting because it feels like it makes a bigger gap between, you on one hand, when everyone had no access to the Internet, that's one thing. But then when everybody did, the people who are looking stuff up in a good, skeptical, scientific way are doing becoming more accurate, knowledgeable than the people are doing the opposite of that, who are like getting misinformation and don't really know how to sort it

0:23:26 Trace: Media Critique And Yeah.

0:23:37 Trace: Yeah. Yeah.

0:24:09 Thomas: Out. And it feels like such it's a important challenge to try to deal with and to try to like educate people on because it just, the gap really feels to be widening every day.

0:24:19 Julian: Mm

0:24:18 Trace: One Of My passions outside of science communication was always media critique. Like, I thought it would be really interesting to go and study, get an advanced degree in media criticism. And it's one of the things that I just really love to read books about and understand. And that really is what it comes down to is almost no one has good media criticism unless you've sat down and tried to build it for yourself. I like to think of most of the way we use the Internet, even though you can look everything everything up, in the way that TV sort of worked, right? You, you sat down on your couch, uh, and to quote, I think Gene Hackman from the movie Jury or something, Runaway Jury.

0:24:58 Thomas: Runaway jury.

0:24:59 Trace: He said they like to sit in their Barker lounger and let the cable TV wash over them, which I thought was a great line. Anyway, but it's like a passive, lean back experience, right? So you don't, you don't actively get to pick what cable shows you. You get to to pick your channel, sure. But most people just put on the same one every day. And Facebook is that. It is a lean back, passive experience. You scroll forever. Instagram, that is Meta's bread and butter, is I'm just scrolling, and it's telling me things, and I'm not really thinking about it, right? And Netflix, you have to go pick something. You have to actively find it. YouTube, you usually have to find it, and the people who are like, "Oh, I'm in the conspiracy conspiracy theory rabbit hole." They call it that, but they didn't actually do a lot of searching for that, right? Maybe they searched for one thing and that led them to an autoplayed video that was more extreme and more extreme to keep them watching.

0:24:59 Thomas: I know runaway jury.

0:25:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Or they created a fucking YouTube account and instantly the algorithm shoved all that down their throats, which is an experiment you can do pretty quickly.

0:25:56 Trace: Right. Yeah. And so it's just like that passive experience is really what hurts people when it comes to trying to think about really anything. The nice thing about the silly Sesame Street reference is looking it up is is active. You have to go look up something. And then ideally, you would look it up again and again and not just take what you're given at that point. Look it up over and over again.

0:26:22 Trace: That's like the basis of any media critique.

0:25:59 Julian: -hmm. Yeah One thing I always try and talk about or bring up whenever I get a chance, I did it today in fact with our vampire episode, is the concept of confirmation bias, because I think this is one One of the like worst fallacies that we all tend to fall into. It doesn't matter who you are. You know, like everybody tends to think like, oh, you know, people who think like me, we're smarter than, you Know, those other, but like confirmation bias gets everybody. And it's this very human tendency to only seek out answers that already confirm what you believe, right?

0:26:58 Trace: Yeah.

0:26:59 Julian: That established this originally, it was, sorry to say it, Thomas, but it was a psychology experiment. But people were asked, no, no it was not.

0:27:06 Thomas: It's okay. It wasn't Jordan Peterson, so I'm sure it's fine.

0:27:09 Trace: No, it's not.

0:27:10 Julian: But was like, okay, I'm thinking of a set of numbers. They all obey a certain rule. You're going to guess a few numbers at a time. And then I'll tell you if they obey my rule. And eventually you're going to try and figure out what this rule is. I did this actually just the other day with a friend to illustrate.

0:27:15 Thomas: Oh, I love this one. Yeah. Yeah,

0:27:28 Julian: And so he starts guessing numbers and he goes like one, three, five. And I'm like, yeah, those all fit. And he keeps going, okay, seven, nine, 11. Yeah, those are all fit and he keeps going and going. And eventually I'm what do you think the rule is? And he goes, odd numbers. And I was like, no, it was all integers, but you never asked me about even numbers. You never asked me about negative numbers. He never asked about decimals.

0:27:28 Thomas: It's so good.

0:27:39 Thomas: Right.

0:27:48 Thomas: There's There's great YouTube videos on that. Like you really people will. And I had never seen him because I'm curious what sure I would fall for that, too. Like start with a sequence. And did I you give him anything or did you just have him start by himself? I think sometimes you can also start with like, yeah, this follows the pattern and, you know, but either way, if you let them start with it, it's amazing how easy it is to be like, oh, I get it. They're all there. It's increasing by two. And then you just start asking questions, confirming that story rather than like, wait, let's try to break the rule and see if that works. And it's such an illustrative example. And when I first saw that, I was like, Oh man, I bet I would also fall for that. It's because it's so easy to do. And we shouldn't feel bad about it. It's just something that I think we all have to try to mitigate.

0:28:00 Julian: No, no. I just said, start guessing, Yeah.

0:28:14 Trace: Yeah, right.

0:28:19 Julian: Yeah. Right. Yeah, and the power of science is that you design your experiments, your research, to try and prove yourself wrong. When you come to a substantial result in a scientific experiment, your conclusion says we want to reject the null hypothesis more And so if you don't get a result, you know, you say you failed to reject the null hypothesis. So, yeah, you're trying to prove yourself wrong in science. And I think humans, unless you kind of have that that training to approach things that way, you don't want to do that. It's not it doesn't feel good to be wrong.

0:29:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:08 Trace: It's not natural. It doesn't feel feel right, yeah, I

0:29:11 Julian: And what I like in our show is sometimes we get questions where you can tell, like, the person's got a point of view and what they want from us is to hear that said back to them.

0:29:19 Trace: Know

0:29:22 Thomas: Yeah. Like a vampire rights activist.

0:29:23 Trace: Exactly which episode you're thinking of yeah the

0:29:25 Thomas: Yeah, totally.

0:29:25 Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Or Trace knows, Trace knows exactly the one I'm thinking, yeah.

0:29:28 Trace: We did We did an episode, uh, while back about a guy, uh, asked if we only ate organic vegetables, how many people would starve. That was his, like, question. It wasn't like, are we allowed, can we, could we possibly, could we feed everyone with organic vegetables with It's

0:29:42 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. How right am I? Can you please tell me? Yeah.

0:29:48 Julian: Yeah.

0:29:48 Trace: And he even wrote, additionally, we're constantly nagged that we should all be eating organic vegetables, and we were just like, what are you talking, like you clearly, and we called him out in it. We're like, you clear have an opinion here, we're not going to leave this question on the floor and and answer it as asked, we're going to answer what the real question here would be. Um, I think that, that, try and be transparent without being mean, and we try, not we, we don't like preach in our podcast. We're not like saying, oh, you shouldn't do that. But we're going to say, like, like we would to our friend, to be like, you have a thought here already, don't you? You, like, you already have an opinion on this, but that's OK. We

0:29:52 Julian: Who?

0:29:55 Thomas: Who? Yeah.

0:30:23 Trace: Can still answer it.

0:30:24 Thomas: So how many people would die?

0:30:25 Trace: We could do it. The answer is we could do It absolutely easily. Not everything needs to be organic in order to be. Like organic doesn't mean healthier, right?

0:30:32 Thomas: Yeah. Organic isn't really a great. Yeah.

0:30:35 Trace: Yeah, it's not a good baseline, but

0:30:36 Thomas: There's skepticism warranted on organic as a label for sure.

0:30:40 Trace: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the answer really ends up being we could, but we couldn't do it tomorrow, right? Like if you flipped a switch and said, okay, all cars have to run on hydrogen. Like we could do that. It would take a minute. Like, We'd have to get our shit together. And it's the same with organic. Like all the studies that come out, to your point, Thomas, from earlier, of like these studies come out that are funded by agribusinesses or something that doesn't want to go to organic farming practices because the yields are lower. They'll just be like, oh, well, the yield's only 40% of what it was. And it's like, yeah, but you didn't do anything else. You literally just said, oh, cool, if we do exactly what we were doing before and flip this one switch, which is good science, like change one variable, here's what happens. And then people take that and run with it, like, well, we should never switch to organic because all food, we would only grow 40% of what we would have grown otherwise. And that's not what they said.

0:30:46 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

0:31:36 Trace: That's not I want to bring up a bias as well, as long as we're talking about biases, though.

0:31:39 Thomas: Sure. Let's just roast us. Humans. Am I right? They definitely smell.

0:31:40 Julian: Needs Them.

0:31:41 Trace: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're the biggest obstacle here. And that's survivorship bias, which I think is another big one that people have. And it comes from a by the name of Abraham Wald, from World War Two. And it's this famous one where airplanes would land after going on bombing runs or whatever, and they would keep track of the ones that came back and where the damage was on the airplanes. They would say, "Okay, cool, where the damages here, we have to armor that area more, because there's a lot of damage here." And it turned out what they forgot to take into account was the planes that didn't come back. So what they really should have been doing is armoring the areas that weren't damaged, because that's where, typically, if you look at diagrams that you could find, that's all the people are all the the people were sitting, like the pilots weren't shot. And so thus the plane could fly back and

0:31:44 Julian: Yeah. Right. Or

0:31:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah.

0:32:32 Trace: Land.

0:32:32 Julian: The hydraulic system that powered the flight controls, you know, know.

0:32:36 Trace: Right.

0:32:33 Thomas: We. All seen this meme. So now I'm actually curious. Is that real? Like, did you? There could be a show of just fact checking memes, which I'm sure there is. But because I thought that was such an interesting meme when I first saw it. And then I've seen it 473,000 more times. And you start to get a little elitist, like, okay, you're still, you haven't seen this already. Come on. It's about the planes and the World War II. We all know this, duh. But was that something that, was that a real story? I never, I just, yeah, it's pretty cool.

0:32:51 Julian: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:57 Trace: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a real story. And that's where he was the one who coined the term because he was studying there, this, this, this thing during world war two. And it's just a fallacy. It's a it's very common, but it's that correlation doesn't equal causation. And it just comes down to any number of other kind of little tricks and mental tricks that you can tell yourself. I mean, a lot of people bring up the Dunning-Kruger effect, which has shaky, you to stand on, but it is really interesting and easy to see it in real life. Know, you these biases are real, and they exist. And all we're doing in science is trying to get outside of those biases. You know, all scientists try and do is be like, what could I be wrong about? Or, and Julian, I don't know if you do this, but when I write a a video about a science topic, I almost always Google or wherever, whatever search I'm using, the thing I'm looking for good, the thing I'm looking forward to

0:33:07 Thomas: Nice. Yeah.

0:33:34 Julian: But Yeah.

0:33:53 Trace: Is the thing that I'm looking for bad, the think I'm look for controversy, the things I'm looking for, like, and then words that I have found over the years that are common, like if it's a drug mechanism of action, because you're only going to get science results there because regular people don't talk that that way. And sometimes you need that.

0:33:53 Julian: Yeah.

0:34:07 Julian: No.

0:34:07 Thomas: Should I censor that? Because I don't want the normal people to learn about that. You know, that's going to ruin your search.

0:34:10 Trace: Oh, okay. Got it. Sure. Yeah.

0:34:13 Julian: Don't don't google like drug or food or whatever and then toxin because you'll get a bunch of bunch of useless crap

0:34:18 Thomas: Yeah yeah yeah

0:34:18 Trace: Yeah, because you'll get nothing. You'll get just trash results. What I call three word websites, nutrient now, now good for you.org, you know, like things that just have these weird, it's always, it'S always three words. Good, healthy living.net. And it's just like, why are you green vegetable growth.org?

0:34:22 Thomas: Oh wow interesting huh they've

0:34:22 Julian: Yeah good healthy living yeah Yeah. And it's it's people telling you that like, oh, don't listen to, you know, big agriculture or big farmer or whatever. They're just trying to get money out of you, by the way, by my eight dollar like blended smoothie drink or whatever, like.

0:34:46 Thomas: Only got two words yeah yep

0:34:51 Trace: Yeah. I has biases. Everybody, scientists, everybody, which is also funny. Like, think about Julian's point from earlier about how science changes over time. And so people don't always know that. And so they see somebody like Anthony Fauci, who sits down and says, I don't think everybody needs to be wearing masks in March of 2021, or whatever. And everybody who doesn't want to wear a mask just grabs onto that with their confirmation bias. And then we're using our our survivorship bias to be like, well, the people are still alive and some of them didn't wear masks. And so I shouldn't either. And it's like, Well, yeah, and the people who are dead, some of them were wearing masks. So and it's just, you know, you can bring all these biases together. But if you just look at the data, clearer. And obviously, Fauci changed his his later, when the science showed, no, actually, more people do need to wear masks. And at the time, we just didn't know that yet. You know, we didn't know how much of a benefit it was going to be.

0:35:10 Julian: Right.

0:35:16 Thomas: Yeah. There You Go Well, Yeah, and not to get into that, there also was, they were worried about mask availability for you know, actual professionals,

0:35:50 Trace: Yeah, exactly.

0:35:50 Julian: Right. The N95s. Yeah, that was part of it.

0:35:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:52 Trace: Yeah. There are all these confounding

0:35:53 Julian: Again, the nuance that gets lost.

0:35:54 Trace: Factors. Yeah? The nuance of it all.

0:35:57 Thomas: I think that's another thing that's really important, especially, and it's it's not necessarily always science related, I think it's also something you learn if you follow and and in a deep way research politics, is I think there's a naive conception that whatever your side is is going to be always right. And I don't even mean that in the like I mean in a different way, maybe than than it sounded. I think, I think there's a conception that if you have found a actor or an inaccuracy in a side, that means that's the wrong side.

0:36:28 Thomas: Whereas I think, you in the year 2024, where everybody's dirty laundry is out on the Internet all the time, there's going to be some things that are like, well, that's a little bit hard to explain about this. Well, it's, you know, Fauci or whoever did make a mistake in this arena. And having the, I think, the realism to notice that, like, well, isn't if he made a single mistake, he and all of science is wrong. No, it should be like, well, let's compare what's the better evidence. And I feel like by now people should realize you find, the few bad examples in any field, and it's not going to disqualify that entire field unless that field is astrology or something. Thing, yeah.

0:36:16 Trace: Mm hmm. Yeah yeah.

0:37:05 Trace: Yeah you're totally right. And every scientist throughout history has made mistakes. They're they're all people and all people make mistakes. No one is perfect. I think even when you see these big big blockbusters like Oppenheimer, where they do try and show him as a person. But even then, it's very difficult sometimes to disconnect people from the science they're doing. Hard for us to hold these competing ideas. Sorry to go back to psychology, Thomas, but this cognitive dissonance in our head of these two competing ideas that Albert Einstein was a genius, but he was also Also kind of a womanizer or some, you know, those are hard things for people to hold in the same time in their brains. Applies to so many different things. These these are people. People are messy. That's why the scientific process profit is supposed to be objective and you have to prove it with evidence.

0:37:56 Julian: Think that's also where a lot of the actual interesting stuff is when we're trying to communicate science to people or anything that like, these topics that people think of as boring. Right. Trace and I were talking about this earlier, but I think, like, a nerd for something. Right? Right. Like you could be you could be a sports nerd. You could be a science fiction nerd or a fantasy nerd or whatever. Right. But like people love learning things and details. And I think a lot of what we're taught about, especially like history or science, is very sanitized and simplified.

0:38:13 Trace: Yes, I love that phrase.

0:38:34 Julian: And the idea is to make consumption easier for us. But it makes it boring and it bums me out. Like, I love going into like, hey, hey, you know what? A hundred years ago, like scientists thought that there was only one galaxy and then like, wow, stuff radically changed. That's not that long ago that like something that you probably think we've always known. No, it was totally different and people fought tooth and nail over it, you

0:38:34 Thomas: The

0:38:39 Trace: Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Until the

0:39:01 Thomas: Wars, I remember. Many lost their lives

0:39:02 Julian: I remember the galaxy wars, the clone wars, but like, or like the Big Bang theory and the expansion of the universe and a lot of questions around it, you know, we're still working through, and that's what makes it cool.

0:39:04 Trace: The Star Wars, they were really complicated.

0:39:04 Thomas: Yeah. Well, No, that show sucks. We solved that one, that's, um, I'm

0:39:17 Julian: No,

0:39:18 Trace: Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, you know, I we didn't even know there were planets around. We guessed there probably were. We didn't Even like confirm that there were planets around other stars until like 1995. I think it was like, not that frickin long ago, You know, and yet here we are discovering planets all the time, finding planets that work like ours, finding solar systems that are completely different from ours, realizing that ours is actually the weird one. And most of them are are completely separate. And it's just really awesome. But

0:39:20 Julian: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But

0:39:22 Thomas: Not a fan. Yeah.

0:39:36 Thomas: There's

0:39:45 Julian: Yeah, And People involved in doing this science, too, they're characters, there's so many that they're so weird or interesting or controversial or something. Like it's, it's a rich, like deep world worth exploring, and like trying to get people to see that, I think, is our, our challenge. That's so enjoyable.

0:40:13 Trace: Yeah. Yeah, I used to work at a history museum, and history is riddled with, with kind of discussion or debate or like a fight between the people who like to tell the stories of all the different people in history, which clearly is more interesting for people. And then the name and date crowd that are just like, in 1874, April 4th, this happened, and on April 5th, Ziskai did this thing. And it, like, there are people who, that's the history that they love, that's not most people. Most people want to hear about Some guy, you know, William Williams was arrested while drunk doing this thing, and it's like, well, I've been drunk before, I think William Williams was probably an all right guy, you just like have a better connection with people, which is great.

0:40:43 Thomas: Something wrong with those people. Sorry

0:40:44 Julian: Yeah.

0:41:00 Trace: Boring.

0:40:58 Julian: But It It drives me nuts that people will voluntarily learn like entire fictional universes of canon, and then when it's like, hey, here's like how the world around you was shaped and became the way it is, and they're like, like that's boring, and you're like, what?

0:41:14 Trace: Boring? Yeah.

0:41:15 Julian: No, how do you not have the brain power to like learn about this? It's so interesting. Yeah.

0:41:22 Trace: People will literally argue to the death about whether Palpatine was doing something political in whatever Star Wars thing, and then but they won't learn about actual politics, or they won't learn about actual people doing actual things, they just like let other people tell them that, because I don't know, they find it more interesting. I don't know, or

0:41:41 Thomas: Yeah, it's hard. I think the that urge to have simplistic answers is so strong in a population level. And to make this observation earlier, but I don't know if I fully have words for it. I'm kind of just starting to think about it. But in interviewing as many scientists as I have on the show, you really can notice a major difference in demeanor of scientists versus even people who are maybe scientists, but they are advocating one way or the other. Like there's a, there's a big difference in the certainty and it doesn't mean that science can't be certain on to a degree that you need it to be, but it, but there's a big, big difference between, "ah, this just isn't holding up," you know, or like this, it just looks like the evidence doesn't quite bear that out. And then like, no, this is this it's that there was a study.

0:41:47 Trace: Mm- -hmm. Yeah,

0:42:15 Julian: Yeah. Yeah,

0:42:31 Thomas: It showed that. And like, doesn't there'S, mean that that's always wrong. Like, I think there are claims certainly that can and should be pushed back on with that kind of certainty, but you, you can just tell the difference, even when it's claims that we shouldn't be so certain about, the difference between people who still want and have that certainty, and the people who genuinely, it's again, I can't quite put it into words. But just having spoken to so many people doing actual science, you know what I mean? Like it's a it's their their mindset is like, well, let me think. Have we done papers on that? Let me let me stretch my mind to that. Yeah. Go.

0:42:32 Trace: No, I get it. Yeah. Scientists, yeah, scientists like rarely speak in absolutes, and that's something that as science communicators, Julian, I know, does, because I've read so much of his work. But like, you end up, and I try to do as well, where you just like end up couching all your language. Um, I have an example, for, I'm writing something for a client, and we're, we're talking about like a what if scenario, where I'm not going to give it away because it's this client's work. But like, what if, the, you, nuclear reactor had never been invented? What would we do? What would the, how would the world be different or whatever? Right. And it's it's essentially that. And their their notes back are like, OK, so you can say if this was never invented, then that. And I'm like, no, I can't. But I can say maybe that. They wanted

0:43:04 Julian: That's exactly. Only

0:43:28 Thomas: Mm hmm.

0:43:39 Trace: To talk about if satellites were never invented. And I was like, well, right?

0:43:41 Julian: A Smith deals in absolutes. Yeah.

0:43:44 Trace: I would have eventually come up with a way to do that, it just wouldn't have been done the way we did it already. Like, so I can't say that it would never happen. There's no, there's No absolutes in this, and now you can make your joke.

0:43:41 Thomas: Mm hmm, yeah. Let's make that joke, too.

0:43:46 Julian: It's there yeah.

0:43:54 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:43:57 Julian: There There's, um, exactly, like you said, that is spot on. What? Oh, sorry. Only a Smith deals in absolutes. Did I get it? Nailed it. Timing. All

0:44:00 Thomas: Too late. No, no, it's okay. I'm

0:44:07 Trace: I think the timing was perfect

0:44:08 Julian: Right.

0:44:08 Thomas: Leaving, I'm leaving both in. Yeah.

0:44:09 Trace: Yeah

0:44:13 Julian: It'll be funnier the second time. No, but you're exactly right. And I think, again, bad actors take advantage of that because people who have a scientific training, their response, their knee-jerk response to everything is like, well, there's no evidence of it. But if that changes then we'll change our body of knowledge right like

0:44:31 Trace: Yeah

0:44:26 Thomas: Yeah, yep. That's a real challenge between, bystanders on the street or on the internet, they are going to react differently to more firm language and they're going to, I think, often discount very very knowledgeable opinions because of the uncertainty with which they express it, you know? And they're, well, this person over here is like, no, this definitely is this. And this person overhears like, well no evidence for that, which often I hate the no evidence for sometimes because in some contexts it's like, No, that's not strong enough because I want to be able to differentiate between, uh, and again, we're talking at generalities, but there are lots of different ways to talk about things like this. I to differentiate between, well, this might exist, but we haven't detected it versus, no, all of our theory is the opposite of this. Like, you're completely wrong. Both of those could be, well there's no evidence for this. I think it's actually important to be more specific than that and not take, that's where you run into the

0:45:00 Julian: It sucks yeah

0:45:17 Trace: Right yeah Yeah. Oh,

0:45:21 Julian: Yeah

0:45:29 Thomas: Other side. Not take an unfortunate, too like neutral kind of passive voice when you shouldn't.

0:45:33 Julian: I I live in Los Angeles where everybody basically plans their lives around their star sign, and I literally get into like big arguments and fights at parties. It happened a couple weekends ago over astrology, and the thing that was killing me was like, all I could say, because people, you know, they knew about my background or whatever. And some wanted to, again, hear that like, oh yeah, there's totally like a great foundation for astrology. And all I could say was like, there is no evidence for it, you know? And people take that.

0:45:47 Thomas: No, you can say more than that. Now I'm mad at you.

0:46:07 Julian: But here is what I do. Here is what do I do at parties when they bring that up. I pick a sign at random. Nobody has ever, ever gone like when they are like, what is your sign? And I am like, I am a Taurus. Nobody has ever gone, that doesn't make sense. Everybody always goes, oh, that makes sense.

0:46:18 Trace: Do Yeah.

0:46:18 Thomas: Yeah. Knew it. Yeah. A hundred percent. Knew it all the time.

0:46:23 Trace: Yeah, yeah.

0:46:21 Julian: Right? Exactly. So I use that to illustrate like the ambiguity.

0:46:26 Thomas: But But I'm going to push back. You can do more than there's no evidence. Like there's a difference between there's No Evidence and the entire mechanism. There's no even suggested mechanism. I think that's an important difference. And there are times when I think we can be more certain and that might, you know, serve science better to be able to make those shades of kind of difference. There is also a problem where, and I've dealt with this a lot. I don't know how much you guys have, but, um, up in the atheism movement and seeing a bunch of skeptic bros, just I thought were like, we all started thinking we're like reasonable sciencey people.

We're actually just latching onto all the worst parts of it that, that aren't science. Were latching They on to the certainty. They were l matching onto the, to the lecturing tone. They're latching unto the feeling of superiority. But they weren't actually latching on to the scientific mindset, you know, and what I think they, like, I'll still see people from time to time, you political arguments, being or like, that's clearly an ideological you're making. Or they will that, like in a way that's evaluating, well, who seems less ideological? That's who's right. Or weird neutrality that they think is science, but but actually isn't like there actually isn't

0:46:35 Trace: Yes. Yes, yeah, yeah

0:46:36 Julian: Right. Yes.

0:47:34 Trace: No.

0:47:34 Thomas: Anything wrong per se with having an ideology. Like, I have, lot, we all have lots of ideologies. If you think that you are somehow above all that, you're lying to yourself, and you're actually just subbing in your ideology unconsciously and then making judgments there and thinking you're like some neutral arbiter. Yeah.

0:47:44 Julian: Yep.

0:47:52 Trace: Yeah I like to remind people that most early scientists were Christians Arabs specifically Muslim scholars and so like there was a lot of Muslim scholars most Most of the stars in the sky are named by people who were Arab astronomers, and often they were Muslim. And there were a lot of Christians who became scientists as well. And then rich people, like all of whom have, like, all of the gentleman scientists of the Victorian era were like, none of them were just normal people going to work every day.

They were all pretty, like well off or in the priesthood or, you know, and the Early scientists were trying to understand in their ideology, whether you believe it or not, like God better if they were a Christian or a Muslim scientist, right? They're trying to find the fundamental rules that God set upon his creation or whatever it was. At the same time, though, they're working in the same direction as somebody who's an atheist scientist professional who's trying to use the same tools to find the answer. The difference is if you look at the answer and you go, well, my ideology says that can't be the answer versus, oh, that's the answer. I'm surprised. That's shocking. We should still publish it.

You you can't let your ideology get in the way of you find no matter where it is. And that's my favorite when it comes to atheism. My favorite argument to make when people are like, so do you believe in God? And I'm like, I'm apathetic to that. Like, I don't care. And they're like, what do you mean you don't carry? And I don'm like I don't care. Care. And they're like, so do you mean you're atheist? And I'm like, no, I don't care.

I don't think it's worth discussing. They're like, well, I DON'T get it. So you don't not believe in God? So are you agnostic? And I'm like, no, I think it's a pointless discussion. It's like arguing whether or not a planet millions of light years away has people on it. Why would I argue about it? No one will ever know. We'll never know that. No one we know will ever know that, no one who lives now or in the future will likely ever know that. Fine, if we get evidence, sure, otherwise why are we talking about

0:48:13 Thomas: Yeah. God. Yeah.

0:49:49 Julian: Yeah.

0:49:49 Trace: It. It's like talking about the weather ad nauseum. Exactly.

0:49:51 Thomas: Until some people are trying to make you do stuff because they believe the weather. There is a certain thing that it isn't. That is where it becomes tough.

0:49:57 Trace: Doesn't make any sense. Why are we talking so much.

0:49:58 Thomas: Well, well, can I get another one of your favorite questions that you have answered before we go?

0:49:59 Trace: Oh. Man, we have so many good ones. Let me pull up my little database here, um, see questions that are coming up, uh, that'll air later this year. Uh, how hard would you have to fart to lift off the ground? That one's fun, um, that one was that one.

0:50:15 Julian: Okay. They aren't all deep philosophical dives. All right, fun.

0:50:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:21 Trace: Here's a here's another one that's poop related. Before the invention of toilet paper, how did people relieve their bottom as to not clog the pipes? That was pod 18, which also answered how strong could a gorilla be if it knew proper bodybuilding techniques. So really a fun one.

0:50:30 Julian: One yeah

0:50:37 Thomas: Oh, wow. Oh man, I love that one. Yeah.

0:50:40 Trace: Do some people hate pineapple on pizza, parentheses, they're wrong. That one was very, very enjoyable.

0:50:43 Julian: Again had a point of view had a point of you that we had to gently, you know, kind of tell them, oh, maybe, maybe they're not wrong. Oh.

0:50:47 Thomas: Yeah. You ever seen that kangaroo that's totally jacked? You should revisit that bodybuilding one with a kangaroo. That's

0:50:54 Trace: I Yeah. That's crazy.

0:50:59 Julian: I loved if you went back in time to see the dinosaurs, would they go extinct from the common cold because we kind of discovered that the the most dangerous thing you could bring back then for dinosaurs would be a chicken.

0:51:06 Trace: Was a good one. That was interesting.

0:51:07 Thomas: Great. Oh, wow. Why? Because of the disease or?

0:51:13 Julian: Yeah, Because chickens and birds in general, right, are descendants of avian dinosaurs, of theropods. And so some diseases that, you know, attack something that both, uh, though they're separated by millions of years, that both groups have in common because a chicken is just built, you know, from slight changes in dinosaur structure yeah, uh, you brought back a chicken with like avian flu, could be really dangerous. Yeah.

0:51:32 Trace: Just a tiny, delicious dinosaur. Yeah. We also had, I think a really fun one that you did, Julian, was if you had a magic communicator to speak to someone in another galaxy, how would you explain left and right? That one was so good, it was so good, I loved that one. That was episode 21. So so so good.

0:51:52 Julian: It was so difficult. I had to go into quantum physics to get a definitive answer. It was was so hard. Yeah. Yeah. No,

0:52:05 Thomas: Interesting.

0:52:09 Trace: So we try we try and mix it up.

0:52:10 Julian: We get a ton of great ones.

0:52:11 Thomas: That's that's blowing my mind right now. Trying to think about that. I got to check that one.

0:52:12 Trace: Uh, here here, we also have had questions, like, what is soup? That one was cool. Uh, oh,

0:52:17 Thomas: Okay.

0:52:18 Julian: I I hate I hate the ones that are just like categories, like defining. There was another one that was like, what is, are all nuts fruit, or what?

0:52:28 Trace: Yeah, I know. Yeah, our nuts, fruit pits.

0:52:28 Thomas: Oh, this was major news to me. This. Okay. Breaking news. The nut discussion. I didn't know that there was so much confusion there. Like things, I'll just say, you know, TLDR, things that you think are nuts are not nuts. Things that you, things you think you're not nuts are nuts. I'm going to say nut a few more times, just to the next up on the big D channel or whatever the fuck, what is nut?

0:52:30 Trace: Oh, man.

0:52:31 Julian: Nut

0:52:44 Trace: Yeah, yes next up on D Play, let's

0:52:54 Thomas: It's yeah.

0:52:49 Julian: News yeah, D d play before

0:52:56 Thomas: Talk about nuts on D play. Yeah, but

0:52:55 Trace: Talk about nuts

0:52:57 Julian: We get to the D Play, gotta start with the nuts.

0:53:00 Thomas: It's crazy. And I felt even dumber. Are you ready for this? Because my son has a nut allergy and I didn't know. Because I mentioned something and a friend of mine was like, well, that's not a nut. It's actually a whatever. And I was like, shut the fuck up. That's a nut, you are making this up. And then I looked it up and I was, like, I need to issue an apology for my strong language earlier.

0:53:21 Thomas: Of course, often the heart acts before the head. It's crazy.

0:53:16 Julian: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and

0:53:19 Trace: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, pot go listen to uh, go listen to pod 19 where Julian answers, uh, was so stupid, is riding a moose more like petting a buffalo or tickling a grizzly bear. And then, I I answer, are nuts actually fruit pits, and really break down the different types of nut and whether they are all just fruit pits, are not.

0:53:36 Julian: I'm

0:53:45 Thomas: Excellent. The show is That's Absurd. Please elaborate. And, hey, feel free, you guys, to throw out. I know Trace probably has 1 ,400 more things he could plug. But throw out anywhere else you want to send listeners.

0:53:53 Trace: I do so many things. Yeah, I mean, that's absurd, please elaborate. It's available everywhere. You can also find me, Trace Dominguez, just Googling that, you'll find I'm do a YouTube thing. I have a PBS television show, a couple of those, and a podcast, which I love. And with Julian you get what you pay for, and we don't make any money from the podcast, so it's great.

0:54:10 Julian: Trace's plus one, sometimes, times, so So, you get, you get exactly what you pay for, which is, that's all it's worth.

0:54:20 Trace: Uh,

0:54:26 Thomas: Uh, what a pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Trace and Julian, thanks for coming on the show.

0:54:27 Trace: Yeah,

0:54:28 Julian: Oh, Thank you for having us.

0:54:31 Trace: Thank you. I I've got one recording on my end, so if nothing else, hopefully.

0:54:50 Julian: I don't.

0:54:53 Thomas: We'll just post your audio. Yeah.

0:54:55 Trace: We'll just, we'll just leave gaps where Julian is and we can re -voice it later.

0:54:56 Julian: Then silence. Once but if you throw in a couple like great point julian but then don't address it

0:54:59 Thomas: Yeah. Could

0:55:04 Trace: I'll just do a Julian impression. Hi, I'm Julian.

0:55:07 Julian: Oh good

0:55:07 Thomas: Be like a Mad Libs for podcasts where we come up with like what we're talking about after the fact. That'd be fun. All

0:55:11 Trace: That would be fun. I've been drunk before I think william Williams was probably an all right guy you