Listener Mail: In One Ear, Out the Third Eye

Robert, Joe and Christian call in the mailbot for yet another dose of listener feedback. Join them as they read your thoughts on everything from the uncanny valley and the Black Stone of Mecca to hook suspension and the science of guessing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Christian Sager and
I'm Joe Mccormickin Today, we're back with another listener mail episode.
It's been so long since we've done a listener mail episode.

(00:24):
That is our bad, not yours, But it does mean
that there's gonna be a lot of great listener mail
we've gotten from you all over the months since our
last episode that it isn't going to make it in.
Please don't take that as an insult, but we we
thought we'd pick some messages coming in in the past
month or so from some recent episodes and and read
them back to you, share with you what you've shared
with us. Right, and so we have to introduce once

(00:46):
more our mail bought Carney, who has emerged once more
from his ubiliette, to to share the mail with us
so that we may share it with you. That might
explain why we've been told recently on Facebook that all
of our episodes are very dark and about what somebody
I think though that it's because Carney is coming out

(01:08):
of a Nubian I think that person who said everything
we we did was evil was confusing what we post
on Facebook with our actual episodes. So what we post
on Facebook is evil? No, I'm not sure of that either,
but I think they were saying, like, you keep posting
stuff about torture, and well, you know, depends on it's
in the eye of the beholder, man. We cover a
lot of a lot of ground and uh and in

(01:30):
doing so, we we touch on a lot of the
darker aspects of reality and human nature. But we also
cover a lot of pretty fun and uh off kilter stuff,
I think. But also as we will as as we
will discuss in this episode, many animals thrive in darkness,
So I think we should get right into it. If
you guys have no objection, let's do it. Okay, Well,

(01:50):
Carney is now spitting out an email that comes to us.
We're actually going to get into a few about the
Uncanny Valley episodes that Robert and I did. So this
first one is from our listener, Vicky, and Vicky says, Hey, guys,
love your show. Half the time that I listen. I've
never heard of the topics, but they're always really interesting.
Thank you. Vicky. Vicky says, I just finished the episodes

(02:11):
on the Uncanny Valley, and that's, of course where we
talked about this concept in robotics and c g I
a character animation where the original understanding of it is
as characters become more realistically human, as they look more
and more like a real human, that be actually become
more disturbing when they get close to the finish line. Uh.
And so we discussed how that might actually be too simple,

(02:33):
how the evidence for and against that existing other ways
of interpreting it, And we discussed what happens when you
go beyond the Uncanny Valley, what happens when you can
create c g I characters that are so good they're
indistinguishable from real humans Stepford Wives? Is that c g
I characters or robots? Okay, yeah, but there wasn't. There's
certainly an uncanny nous to them intended once they have

(02:55):
been turned into robots. Totally. So anyway, Vicky says, I'm
a Star Wars fan, but not obsessively. Ask me about
Star Trek. I know tons about that. Oh boy, I
didn't know that Peter Cushing was deceased or that they
used technology to recreate his character here. She's referring to,
of course, in Rogue one, the character of Grand mof Tarkan,

(03:16):
who was played by Peter Cushing, who is now deceased.
They brought him back from the dead using the powers
of c G I. Uh but but Vicky says, I
thought they did some anti aging technology magic on him.
Obviously at the ending I knew something was up. Uh.
My question is about possible ethical issues and using this technology,
Hollywood can make any actor perform in any movie, and

(03:38):
if they're deceased, they could be putting these actors into
movies they would not be a part of. For example,
before they had agreed to kill off Hans Solo to
persuade grumpy Harrison Ford to be in The Force Awakens,
they could have used this technology to put him into
twenty seven more Star Wars movies. And even if they
couldn't get away with it while he was alive, who
would stop them from doing it once he passed. As

(04:00):
amazing as this technology is, I think it has kind
of bizarre and questionable implications. What are your thoughts? Again?
Love the show, keep up the great work. Well, thank
you very much, Vicky. And this is a big question. Uh.
It's it's in fact not just theoretical about the future.
I mean that there have already been uses of actors
after they died. Apart from Peter Cushing, I think that

(04:20):
wasn't There's some commercial a while back that used Fred
ash Stare or something like that. And yeah, I do
think this is a big question. Now. On one hand,
you could say, well, once you're a public figure, once
you're in the public domain, people are going to be
calling upon your likeness without your consent all the time.
For example, fan fiction can be written about you personally

(04:44):
or about characters you played, and you have no control
of that whatsoever. Right, and then there's of course the
right of parity, yeah as well. But but but then
when you get down to say a character like Elvis Presley,
It's one thing to have parody related to to representations
of Elvis, but his estate is so locked down. You're
you're only going to see if there's c g I

(05:04):
Elvis is around, like official c g I Elvis is,
you can you can be pretty sure those are going
to be uh, you know, officially authorized by the estate.
It's just that not everybody's a state uh is as
buckled down or will be as buckled down as the
press ley Est state. Yeah. I mean, I was gonna say,
I don't know if you guys covered this in the
episode or not, but I'm pretty sure Peter Cushing's a
state gave the legal go ahead for that to be done.

(05:26):
R Yeah, they did so. I mean, what we're asking
here really is a question of like actor contracts or
really any public figure contracts. We we should really look
at our contracts, guys, well, whether or not people can
bring us back from the dead. No, I mean, I
think the question is like, should this be like what
are what are your rights to your likeness? If it

(05:46):
is something that you have it's not like footage that
you shot being there in person, but somebody completely recreating
your likeness from the ground up, should you be able
to I mean, how much rights do you have over
somebody drawing a picture of you? And is a c
g I simulation of you that's indistinguishable from real just

(06:06):
an advanced version of somebody drawing a picture of you.
One of the interesting things about this is that is
we're considering this, We're we're saying, all right, your likeness
will digitally, uh continue on after you were dead and
you can have certain terms and legal uh contracts that
represent what your wills and wishes would be. In a sense,
you're beginning to create a program for your identity. You're

(06:29):
beginning to create a digital version of your will to
live on with the digital version of your appearance. And
so we're kind of seeing like a form of digital
immortality that emerges out of the need and the like
the commercial application of your likeness and the desire to
control it after death. That's interesting. Yeah, So, like you're saying,

(06:50):
if there are high quality digital simulations of people who
have died, you could maybe have a situation where you
write a will that says I would agree to having
high quality digital simulations of me do X, Y and Z,
but they can't do a B and C. So you'd
almost be you'd be like creating an idealized version of
you that lives on. That's sort of what you're saying. Yeah,

(07:12):
kind of almost like a limited ghost of yourself, but
it's a ghost that's not concerned with with haunting individuals,
but rather just one that's interested in just tending to
your reputation. After that, I will only be featured in
baked beans commercials. Okay, well, interesting thoughts. Thanks Vicky. Should
we look at another one from the Uncanny Valley episode?

(07:33):
I know we got some correspondence from our frequent listener
Peter right. Oh yeah, Peter cron Of or p K
of King de Luxe Records. He is a long time
friend of the show and writes him quite a bit.
Uh And he wrote in and shaired quite a bit
on the Uncanny Valley because he's, among other things he's
involved in in virtual reality interests in the creation of

(07:56):
a virtual reality space station. The my understanding is is
going to be like a uh space for art and
performance in the digital realm. It's not going to be
like that ship and event horizon. I don't know, it
might be what is that but performance art. We'll actually
get into an example of that in a bet. But
Peter wrote in and said, great episodes on the Uncanny Valley.

(08:17):
It's one of my biggest interest as trying to help
create characters and avatars in virtual reality involves a lot
of playing around with these ideas, and for me it's
a very real thing, not just with humans, but I
feel like there's an effect like this when you get
close to anything, This sort of mismatch, as you guys mentioned,
So he's saying there's an uncanny valley not just for
human faces, but for likeness toward reality in any domain. Yes,

(08:42):
he says, although the effect is stronger with humans because
we're so intimately familiar with faces, but also, as mentioned,
you can get used to it kind of. Although being
in a three D space in VR with an avatar
feels different to the brain than seeing it from the outside,
which was also brought up. I believe, I think you
said being there in person, and that's what it feels like.
In VR. You have a more emotional connection with the

(09:05):
character and that can override some of the uncanny nous
I believe, because your resources are focused on their emotional state. However,
it can also exaggerate the awkwardness I found, so that's
sort of mitigating against There was one author we talked
about who wrote an article saying, you know, I had
looked at some humanoid robots on video and thought that
they were really creepy. I had the uncanny Valley effect,

(09:27):
but then when I went and saw those robots in person,
they didn't bother me. And other people attest that you
can get used to things that cause the uncanny Valley
effect at first, But it sounds like Peter sort of
weighing in on both sides of that. Yes, I believe
so Marvel movies are an example of the uncanny Valley.
In another way, I think I don't find the newest
hulk creepy per se, but it looks worse than some

(09:49):
older hulks more c G I, despite the amount of
work and technology that I'm sure went into it, as
it gets closer to imitating muscle movements and facial expressions,
it looks worse and worse. Although I'm positive will get
over this hump, at which point we'll have to worry
about stuff like, like you discussed any episode applying expression
to video, not just to make faulty evidence, but things

(10:10):
like playing for witnesses re enactments that rewrite their brains,
whether they like it or not, implanting new memories. That's
really interesting. Uh So, I sort of agree with Peter
about how, in a lot of cases, the as c
G I gets better, it's somehow does sort of look worse. Uh,
not just in the Uncanny Valley sense, but also in

(10:31):
the sense of like adding more details to things makes
it look more unreal somehow. You remember the Transformers movies,
when like the Transformers to be transforming and they'd have
all these moving parts. They'd say, okay, let's have eight
million moving screws and widgets and stuff on Optimus Prime
as he transforms through this freeway battle scene, and it

(10:52):
just looks so busy. It looks unreal. It looks crappy. Yeah,
like you want to go back to Tarkin. When I
find me watch Rogue One, which was just a couple
of weeks ago, he didn't really bother me as much,
perhaps because I was prepared for it, but there were
a few moments where if I had to say what
bothered me about it, I'd say it was it was
like he was over articulated, like he was a puppet

(11:14):
in the puppeteer was just going all in. I would
say the c G I Tarkan in Rogue one had
too many pores for me, Like they were trying to
give his face real human texture by giving him all
these pores and crags and stuff. And I know that's
hard to do, so again we're not knocking the work
done by these animators. It's very difficult, but he had
so much texture on his face. It was too much texture. Also,

(11:38):
when you think about Peter Cushing, right, like the movies
that he was well known for, we're not shot in
high definition, right, so we think of our memory of
Peter Cushing is sort of blurrier than rogue one's memory
of him, right, Like, like it was like being up
close and personal with him if you're seeing all these
pores and facial crags and stuff like, like like trying

(12:00):
to imagine an HD Peter Cushing is like trying to
imagine a color. Charlie Chaplain, Yeah, Christian, you got an email. Yeah.
We did uh an episode on the Doomsday Clock a
couple of weeks ago. For those of you not familiar,
this is the clock that calculates humanities countdown to annihilation.
Is calculated by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and we

(12:23):
took a look at it and tried to figure out
what it all goes into that that brings us closer
to the theoretical Midnight on the clock. And in the episode,
I brought up that I had just recently seen a
T shirt that somebody was wearing on an airplane. It
was a Lotus flower with two machine guns in it,
and on it. It said piece through Superior firepower and

(12:44):
what I When I looked it up, it said it
had come from Aliens and I wasn't aware of that.
So our a listener, Rich wrote into us about this.
Actually we had multiple people wrote into us about it,
but Riches really hits something on the head here. Apparently
it is a phrase that comes through the American millitary
from well before Aliens. He says, I just finished the
Doomsday Clock episode. It's another great podcast. I've got three comments. First,

(13:08):
piece through Superior Firepower is older than Aliens. I was
in the U. S Air Force in nineteen seventy nine
and that phrase was the unofficial slogan of the Strategic
Air Command or s a C. I assumed because they
controlled a lot of the nukes and conventional bombs. I've
seen unofficial US Air Force s a C patches with
that slogan. I don't know how old the phrases, but

(13:31):
Teddy Roosevelt speaks softly but carry a big stick was similar.
So we I was kind of wondering, like where this
had come from? Uh, And it seemed at the time
that it was something that was was written for the movie.
It was on one of the characters uniforms, but clearly
it has origins in the real world. Then he addresses
the actual doomsday clock, and he says the fear of

(13:53):
nuclear annihilation, regarding that I was born in nineteen sixty
and I think I saw fallout shelter signs in my
elementary school. However, we never had drills of hiding under
our wooden desks like our older siblings. I heard those stories,
and while I was concerned with nuclear annihilation a bit
in the seventies and eighties, I always assumed the fifties

(14:13):
were worse, so I didn't worry about it too much
throughout my life. This is something Robert and I talked
about in the episode. Us being children of the eighties,
the sort of specter of the Cold War was always
hanging over us as little kids. But uh, it sounds
like what Riches proposing is that maybe it was worse
than the fifties. And I can imagine too, if that's
you know, you're a decade after the war, there's probably

(14:34):
a lot of scares in the air about potential warfare.
And then his third comment is about climate change, which
so one of the things we learned in that episode
was that they calculate climate change as a part of
moving the doomsday clock, even though originally it was mainly
based on nuclear weapons. So he says climate change should

(14:56):
be included in the doomsday clock along with any other
probability of ending the world, and then he ends it
with saying asteroids question mark, maybe we should take a
look more rich No, something we don't I don't know,
I don't know. Oh. I think what he means is
the the apocalypse that comes when we all get locked
into playing asteroids so much that we stopped eating and breeding. Yeah. Well,

(15:18):
I really want to thank him for clarifying the thing
about the piece through superior firepower, because I had no
idea what that was. And when I saw it, uh,
you know, I think it was probably maybe a month
after the election, and I was just like, well, this
is kind of freaked me out a little bit. But
you know, apparently that's just my sensitivity. This is something
that goes back a good forty years. Well interpreted his

(15:40):
point about asteroids being, of course that at the risk
of near Earth objects hitting the Earth, which is something
I would I always think about this that pretty much
anytime I look up into the sky. But since my
son is he's about five now, and he's super into dinosaurs,
so he's he's I'll often ask not only about dinosaurs,
but about uh, the risk of meteors and meteorites and

(16:02):
comets and asteroids. You know, ask why this happened and
will it happen again? And the answers that you have
to give are not always that reassuring. It's kind of like, well,
you know, for the most part, we keep track of
it the you know, we we have we have organizations
that watch the skies and and he says, well, what
if one's gonna hit the earth? Was so, well, we

(16:24):
have a few different plans in place that might do
the trick if we catch it early enough. But it's
not quite it's not quite as reassuring an answer as
I would like to give. Sitting Down for a double
feature of Deep Impact and Armageddon. Oh man, which of
those movies is worse? That's a good question. That's an

(16:45):
episode for another day. Well, I mean, what you should
I think the way you should frame it to your
child is well, statistically, on a time scale of X
number of years, we know that it will happen again. Yeah, No,
I mean, that's the thing that takes the uncertainty just
you know, it's some it's a dice roll. Sometime in
the next hundred thousand years, there's going to be a
large impact. It's gonna happen. Will we be prepared for it,

(17:08):
Will we have the the collective will that the collective
effort in place to deal with it? And you know,
there are times where I think, yeah, we're totally we're
getting there. Well, we'll totally be there, And in other
times where I think, now it's gonna it's gonna lose
its importance to people. Uh, people are gonna stop watching
the skies. They're gonna be busy, you know, staring into

(17:30):
each other's hearts like we always do. We're gonna be
arguing about stuff on Twitter when it's looming. Here's my
cynical worldview. We can't even get the roads to work
right here in Atlanta. How are we gonna take care
of any falling objects from the sky. The highways collapsed
twice in the last three weeks. Well I think one
of them was technically a buckling, which is even better. Yeah,
we're really taking care of our infrastructure. Okay, you guys

(17:53):
ready for another one. Let's do it. Here we got
some feedback on our Chinese immortality episode Robert and I
did this. We were discussing various Chinese mythical figures, including
one who attained this state of immortality or near immortality,
but lived in an altered state which entailed a diet
of only air and do and an apparent loss of

(18:13):
some male sex characteristics. Now in the episode, I used
this as a springboard to talk about some of the
studies that have suggested a connection between longevity. First of all,
between longevity and caloric restriction and animals, and second between
longevity and castration and men. And our listener Pat wrote
in with a response about the alleged benefits of castration.

(18:35):
So Pat says, Dear Robert and Joe, First of all,
love your work and everything you guys do. Your podcast
has been a staple of mind for quite some time,
and I appreciate all the research and critical analysis that
goes into every episode. Please read this email from a
constructive view rather than as a critique of the wonderful
work you guys do on the podcast and subsequent publication.
Well you're you're too kind, Pat, Before you set us

(18:55):
up to swat aston Now I'm instantly flinchtioned because I
know he's going to come out. Okay, So two notes
regarding the recent podcast on Chinese immortality, Elixirs and Enlightened Beings,
both stemming from my research regarding male hypogonadism induced by
androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer treatment, of which I'd
be happy to discuss further if interested. Um, although the

(19:18):
two studies you discussed, and those were Hamilton's, Hamilton's and
Gordon and men at All purported the castration of men
increased life expectancy, both are quite questionable in terms of methodology.
Hamilton's and Gordon's paper is in a population that in
no way can be compared to the broader population sample.
That population, by the way in Hamilton's and Gordon's paper

(19:39):
was institutionalized men. Uh And then second pat says men
at All study relies on a methodological process I cannot
believe past peer review in a scientific journal. And by
this he's referring to relying on historical records of unix
life expectancy from the seventeen hundreds. Uh. So hat continues,

(20:00):
It's undoubted, undoubtedly confounded by the time period in which
the data was observed, Whilst fascinating, neither provide what I
would consider robust evidence that this phenomenon is presented in men.
In fact, evidence suggests the opposite, In that hypogonadle men
are at greater risk of mortality. For further reading, see
the following and Pat lists several papers that seemed to

(20:23):
show an association between increased mortality and UH and loss
of male sex characteristics. Pat continues, I appreciate there's a
large amount of heterogeneity amongst trials. However, claiming that men
can benefit from castration or being quote less manly is oversimplified,
in my opinion, not in line with current current scientific knowledge. UH,

(20:44):
and I would I would say, well, I would certainly
agree with pat on that while the studies we cited
are real, I hope it came through that the thread
connecting them to the topic of the episode was primarily
a humorous one because an advocating for people to go
out and become you know, I was advocating castration is
a proven life extension technique. However, Various is your favorite

(21:05):
character on Game of Thrones, right, Various is a good character. Actually,
he's he's surprising. I like him yeah, I think if anything,
we were promoting uh dallast alchemy, that's a lifestyle choice.
It's true. Yeah, the the elixirs are where it's really
the castration is that that's only a side product. However,
I do want to say, despite that, I really do

(21:26):
appreciate Pat's note about the potential methodological flaws in the
two studies I did mention in the episode. I'd take
both of those points pretty strongly. I think those are
good things to consider. Uh And also for pointing out
the studies that are going in the other direction, saying
there might be a connection between hypogonadism and connection to mortality.
So to reinforce, no matter how much you think you

(21:48):
want more life if you are male, self castration is
not a scientifically proven way to get it. Remind me again,
what are the name of crab? Gonads? Go nopods go
no pods. That's the crab equivalent of a penis. But
back to Pat's email, this is something we've discussed off
air a lot. Back to pods, Pats email, No came up.

(22:13):
I didn't think so. Back to pats email. Another point,
a very minor one, but you noted that one study
I think it was the second one in which you
discuss monkeys and caloric restriction. Observed a quote very slight increase,
albeit not statistically significant. Although you don't overly run with
this finding, it would generally be stated as finding no
difference rather than a very slight, non significant increase. This

(22:36):
one might be me being a little picky, but I
know I've been pulled up on this one by supervisors
and pure view in the past, so I ensure I
only mentioned direction when statistics are there to support. And
Pat's right about this. I mean generally in science, if
you see an increase but it doesn't meet the statistical threshold,
it means, you know, this is possibly within the margin
of error, so you you shouldn't really cite that as

(22:59):
a meaningful increase. And I don't think we did try
to cite it as a meaningful increase. It just you know,
it's it's But but what Pat saying is if the
increase is not statistically significant, it's not even worth mentioning
that there was an increase, which you can make that argument. Finally,
Pat mentioned a book we might be interested in, known
as The Emperor of All Maladies by said Arthur mccergee

(23:21):
and I took a look at this. It does look
very interesting, so I want to check it out. But
it's it's about cancer. Uh. And Pat suggests potentially doing
an episode on cancer treatments in the future, wonders if
his email will end up on a future mail Bot episode. Well,
here we go. I would recommend going back and listening
to our second episode about m d m A we

(23:41):
talk a lot as being cancer treatment possibility. Yeah. Finally,
on another follow up email, Pat says that he enjoyed
our episode about radiation Life after Radiation, including the stuff
about the fungus that might be an eater of rad's.
Oh yeah, the eater of Rad's episode. This is the
one where we talked a little bit about Godzilla, uh,
and then a lot about Chernobyl like. It was one

(24:05):
of these where we we we went in thinking that
Godzilla would be more of the hook, but the episode
was far more serious, so we ended up backing off
from the a lot of the Godzilla branding on that one.
I think we ended up talking a decent amount about
Godzilla in the Facebook live we did. Did you guys
say let them fight? No, we did not, just a

(24:25):
missed opportunity. Which one is that from that's from the
latest Godzilla movie, the latest American Gonzilla movie and watah,
yes nice. Alright, we you know, we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we have some
more listener mail related to episodes that we've covered in
the past, some in the distant past. Alright, we're back.

(24:46):
So I wanted to share an email here. This was
an interesting one because it's uh, someone who has has
listened to a lot of the back catalog as well.
And uh, her name is Ainslie. She wrote in on
Facebook and she in about the mixology episode that Joe
and I did together. Uh, and she had some tidbits
about cannabis flavored vodka. Yeah. But she also referred to

(25:11):
an older episode, uh that that touched on suspension bondage,
the idea of you know, suspending oneself on hooks placed
in the flesh, and uh, this was from from years back.
But she said that that in it, we we kind
of were doubtful, the hosts were kind of doubtful that
you could have just a single hook in a person
and serving as the suspension, that you would need to

(25:31):
have more than one. But she says Oh no, you can.
You can suspend on just one so really yeah, So
I at this point I was like sold Jim Rose
Circus stuff over. Yeah, indeed. And so at this point
I realized, Oh, well, she's she has some experience in this.
Maybe I'm gonna ask her about it. I would love
to hear, you know, straight from someone who's engaged in
suspension work. You know what it consists of. And she responded,

(25:55):
so this is what she said. Yes, I've been a
practitioner for a handful of years now and have been
a afforded a number of opportunities to perform publicly with
some really fantastic people. I love performing. I love the
shock factor and the energy. I love the confused looks
of awe and disgust from the crowd. But when I
took my first hooks, I was about nineteen, full of
angst and rage. I wanted to feel something intense, anything

(26:17):
at all. But what happened changed my life forever. Suspending
for that first time was indescribable. It was like like
I had relaxed my tense muscles for the first time
in my life, like I had overcome my mind and
shrugged off the long accustomed sticky sense of self doubt.
Really I can't find the words, but I fell in love.
I was allowed to feel and bleed and openly respect

(26:39):
the process of each It was a whole new world
for me. Suspension became my life anyway. I always sent
a few pictures of some of my favorite flesh suspensions
and flesh polls, and I'll point you in the direction
of suspension dot org. Hopefully they're still running their design.
Hook Life links should be at the bottom of the homepage.
Hook Life features some beautifully written firsthand accounts and photograph

(27:00):
and she also recommends a book titled Learning to Fly
Cool that actually sounds like my experience with a sensory
deprivation tank, because it was very similar that like the
floating sensation. They actually tell you this before you you
get in them, but like your muscles start to relax
so much that you realize that there's like you're feeling

(27:23):
muscles for the first time that you didn't really know
we're there. It's pretty fascinating. I couldn't imagine that you
would get the same experience from suspension, but that sounds
really cool. Yeah, And I said, uh, suspension bondage earlier.
I think the more correct terms just hook suspension but
cut any rate, or just suspension in general. So that
was that was my misstep there. But I found this

(27:44):
really interesting to hear from from her, and she sent
some pictures of showing her engaging and suspension, and uh, yeah,
it's it's one of these things where you see pictures
of it or footage, and especially if it's on TV,
it's really played up for the shock value, and you
don't necessarily have enough in site into how this person
is interacting with the experience, like what the role is

(28:06):
is it? You know, how how does pain factor into it?
Is it pleasure? For like what's going on here? So
I really appreciated her words and I thought she expressed
it rather nicely there. I think for a lot of
people that might be surprising that some people who do
this seem to approach it from a kind of performance
art point of view. I mean, to to be blunt,
I think a lot of people would look at that

(28:26):
and just consider they think it's some kind of sex
act or something. Well, and also I think like probably
in pop culture, the go to for this is that
movie The Cell where oh yeah, the guy who does
it is like a serial Killer. So yeah, I mean
I think, yeah, most people just assume that it's got
negative connotations or or just sexual connotations to it. But anyway, yeah,

(28:47):
really interesting. So it just goes to show again that
we have we have such great fans out there, and
and some of them are engaged in so many interesting areas,
be it's something at the academic or you know, performance oriented,
or or something experiential that is uh, you know, beyond
what what we generally have the scope to relate to directly. Here,

(29:08):
Hell raiser is in the best way. Okay. So I
wanted to look at a couple that came in about
the episode Robert and I did about the London underground mosquito.
So in that episode, one of the things I mentioned
was that I was wanting to come across an animal
that was a cave dwelling albino bird. Wouldn't that be great?

(29:28):
Like an albino vulture with red eyes that lives exclusively
underground be terrifying? And Laura writes in about this, Laura says, Hi, guys,
in the podcast on the London underground mosquitoes, you said
in passing it would be cool if an underground adapted
bird species arose. Whilst not quite an albino man, a
lot of our listeners right in with whilst good grammar

(29:55):
better grammar than I do, I think that just indicates
a British listenership. But wilst not quite an albino red
eyed vulture, the oil bird is adapted to spending much
of their lives and caves. The avian answer to the
fruit bat. They do leave the cave at night to
find and eat fruits, but spend the rest of the
time in caves as large colonies as an adaptation to

(30:17):
their dark abode. They echo locate like bats, but in
the audible range for humans, so their caves must be
very loud. They also have good night vision and bristles
on the face for navigation. Caves are rarely rich enough
in small mammals lizards are carrying for carnivorous birds to
specialize in this food source only will still retaining wings.

(30:38):
Flightless birds tend to live in rich forest floors or
places where running helps, so it's unlikely that your dream
of an albino vulture will ever become an evolutionary reality. Well,
thank you Laura for writing this in because I looked
up oil birds and these things are cool. They have
Wilfred Brimley mustaches like Cocoon Wilfred Brimley or Ewok movie

(31:00):
Wilford Brimley. I've never seen Cocoon or the e Walk
movie all the way through. I'm in a bad what
did you? What did you back out on thee I
think the only parts of the e Walk movies I've
seen in the parts you made me watch for trailer talk.
So that was something about giant spiders, and the giant
spiders are in the first one. Wilford Brimley's in the second,

(31:21):
and that's the one. It's got works in it and
evil which e Walk's child massacre. Yeah, oh no, that's horrible.
That's how it begins. Horrible. Yea. Anyway, so yeah, Laura
writes in about oilbirds. You listening at home, look up
an oilbird. This is a good thing to look up.
They've got really funny mustaches and apparently all of these

(31:44):
crazy traits Somewhat what I was asking for, but not
quite there to be an albino monster. Hey, at least
Nature's meeting me halfway on this one. But do you
mind if I take another quick look at an email
we got about the London Underground Mosquito episode if Carney
will allow it. Yes, looks like Carney has given the
green light. So this one comes from our listener, David. Hi, guys,

(32:05):
I've recently started into your podcast and have been enjoying
your addition to my podcast library. I particularly liked a
recent episode far Below the London Underground Mosquito and had
a comment and a super cool and relevant link to share. First,
the comment from a biologist perspective, one pretty well versed
in both evolution and entomology. It was kind of funny

(32:25):
to hear you initially asked the question, what if a
species becomes trapped in the underworld, can it become a
different species altogether, to which the answer is not just yes,
it's possible, but assuming the species actually survives and doesn't
just die out, the answer becomes necessarily yes. Mutation and
natural selection virtually guarantee that a persisting segregated population will

(32:49):
become a different species than its original species given enough generations.
Even some of the most successful ancient forms like dragonflies
and sharks, have evolved and diversify since their ancient fossilized ancestors,
and those were very successful in stable forms not trapped
in a particular habitat. Evolution is only accelerated by having

(33:09):
a drastically different new habitat and the presence of a
tantalizing new man made niche begs for something to fill it.
Insects are like tiny evolution machines, especially with those rapid
reproductive cycles. It is not surprising that an underground population
of subway mosquitoes is diverging into a new species. It
just makes sense. Second, given the topic of underworld segregation

(33:33):
making weird new species, you have to read this BBC
article if you haven't, about a Romanian cave filled with
a bizarre, unique invertebrate ecosystem after being isolated from the
surface world for five point five million years. Consider it
the London underground on steroids, with ample amounts of time
for evolution to occur. Any who, you might not have

(33:54):
finished reading this. I did, but I wanted to pass
it along anyways, and there's always the possibility of not
being ignored. Hey, don't sell yourself short, David, this was
a good email. He ends by saying, stay science, e David.
I really appreciate this email. I went and I read
the BBC article on the Movile cave in Romania, which
is fascinating. Have you guys read anything about this? No? No, oh,

(34:16):
you should check this out. It is so cool. So
it's a cave system sealed off from the surface until
it was broken into by some Soviet scientists in the
nineteen eighties, I think maybe nine seventies. It hasn't been
open to the surface all that long. And it's toxic
in there. It's full of gases, full of carbon dioxide
and a sulfitic environment. And there are these organisms down

(34:41):
there that are these albino translucent scorpions and spiders and leeches,
and there are these bacterial mats that float on the
surface of the water in the cave that are described
as being like wet tissue paper. You can sort of
pick them up and peel them apart, all made of bacteria.

(35:02):
This sounds awful. That sounds like the worst vacation in
the world. This sounds like your home, Christian. Yeah, I
don't know, I don't know your house. I mean, I
mean it sounds it sounds fitting to your personality. Come on,
it's dark, it's got scorpions and spiders in it, and
you can swim and wet tissue paper water scorpions. Yeah,

(35:23):
and so it's and it's totally dark down there, and
it's it sounds so cool, you should you should go
look this up. It's called the Movile Cave in Romania.
Really really worth a look. But also I wanted to
comment on what David was saying about the the our surprise,
or at least our questioning of the evolution of the
new species of mosquito in the London underground. One of

(35:45):
the things that's really interesting to me is that you
could have a new species evolve when there's not an
impenetrable barrier. You know, it's not like an island chain
that's separated and nothing's really going back and forth. You
can always iagine that mosquitoes should be sort of coming
up and going back down into the London underground. Right.

(36:06):
There are openings, there are doors, there are events, there
are shafts. So I sort of wonder why didn't cross
breeding can continue to occur enough to to keep this
from really diverging. But um, yeah, I guess there must
be a good reason. It's because scorpions can't mate with
tissue paper. So guys, I'm looking over at Carney Carney
is starting to smoke a little bit. We need to

(36:28):
let him cool down. So we're gonna take another quick break,
and when we come back, we're gonna jump right back
into the mail. All right, we have returned, you're ready
to jump into the mail. We So I got a
piece here that is about our episode on flesh bound books.
We did a book an episode called Books of Flesh

(36:50):
Anthropodermic Biblio Peggy. This is about libraries that claimed that
they contain books that are bound in human flesh, and
so we were looking into like whether or not they
actually exist or not, and how to scientifically actually categorize
these books. And we talked about a specific example in
that episode, and Matt wrote in and he said, I

(37:10):
really enjoyed the episode about the flesh bound books. I
have been listening for a while now and I love
the show. Have thought about writing a few times, but
never had enough to say until now. In this episode,
you mentioned Junior out of college had a flesh bound
book that was tested and was really sheep skin. We did. Indeed,
my grandma worked in that library years ago and is
still friends with the entire department. So I called her

(37:32):
and I got her to set up a walkthrough of
their treasure room. They happen to have a lot of
amazing books in the treasure room. The person who takes
care of the treasure was not there when I went in,
so I wasn't able to see the flesh bound book,
but I did get to see the rest of the collection,
which includes a Bible printed in fourteen seventy eight. They
are a set of the first Bibles printed in America

(37:53):
in German. Here are some pictures I took, so he
attached a bunch of photos from this and it's pretty cool.
The printing press is from the early eighteen hundreds of
the late seventeen hundreds, and it's a wooden printing press
that still works. They tested it a few years ago,
which they said is very difficult to set up. I
will be going back sometime in the future when they
find where the flesh bound book is, but it's only

(38:16):
abound in sheep flesh. But yeah, that's super cool. Thanks
for sending that in, Matt. I always love when our
episodes lead to field trips for people. Oh yes, now,
speaking of trips, I have one here and this comes
to our listener, shah Hit, who is an economist, and
he writes in in response to our episode on the
black Stone of Mecca, which is a really fun episode
where we talked about the the the history of the

(38:38):
black Stone, both the historical history, the sort of religious history,
as well as what scientists can at least theorize about
its cosmic history, right because obviously they can't take it
to their labs to test it right, and that's not
gonna happen anytime in the foreseeable future. Uh So, But

(38:59):
in the said we said, hey, we looked to hear
from any uh Muslim listeners we have out there who
might have, you know, their own take on how we
handled the topic or if they had you seen the stone,
And we actually heard from a couple of people I
believe on Twitter who had seen the stone or or
had a family member who had gone gone on the hodge.
Uh So, this listener rights and it says a longtime

(39:20):
listener here, I just wanted to say that I thoroughly
enjoyed listening to y'all's episode on Alhajir al Haswad. As
a Muslim. It was really great to hear y'all go
through the painstaking process of being understanding and I can
only imagine the difficulty that comes with tackling a religious topic,
especially on a different religion. As always, I appreciate the
interesting podcast, especially while at work here where I deal

(39:43):
with the dryness of economics on a daily basis. If
you guys may need some insight on the topics of
Islam or economics, feel free to reach out and I'd
be more than glad to be of assistance. Please take
care and have a wonderful day. Well that was really
great to hear, But I don't think it was two
painstaking process. I don't know. No, I mean, it's a

(40:04):
it's it's like any exploration that we we take into,
you know, another cultural or another religion, you know. Certainly,
I think we always take a great deal of care
and so that we're understanding it as best we can
while respecting what we can't understand, you know. And it's
gonna be mindful of the limits of our perspective. Yeah, um,
and you know we and I think we always approach

(40:26):
these topics with an enthusiasm and and and a desire
to understand it as much as possible. Uh So, yeah,
I don't I'm sure we'll get into some more We've
certainly cover topics that involve economics from time to time,
so it's good to have an economist in the rolodex.
But also I would love to do another topic in
the future on on something related to Islam, and so

(40:48):
it'll be nice to have somebody we can potentially throw
a question out to there. Yeah, so thanks for getting
in touch I had. I've actually got one here that's
somewhat related to that. Uh, this is another kind of
feel good listener mail that we received. So Robert and
I did two episodes in one week that we're a
little touchy, and we felt like we had to be
careful about how we presented them. The first one was

(41:11):
about fertility and ovulation and consumer decision making. We're looking
at research that was done by a marketing researcher into
how ovulation affects decision making when it comes to buying
things and politics, and how companies are taking advantage of
that by basically using targeting information to try to advertise
at women who are ovulating. And the same week we

(41:34):
did our episode on sexpots, where we talked about some
controversial stuff around sex robots and specifically how they're used
for for therapy for Surrogates. We received this email from
Julie and she said, what a pair of episodes this week.
I typically respond with heaps of anxiety to discussions of
the topics you all covered. I e. Ovulations, effects on behavior,

(41:58):
and sex spots. As an ovulator, I fear the possibility
that people will reduce my own behaviors to my hormone levels,
and as someone in a female body, I get really
creepy Crawley when I see sex spots, fearing that they
represent forms of existence to which men wish to reduce
my person. I'm sure you get it. Point. Being at

(42:20):
the top of both episodes this week, I was not
sure I'd make it through anxiety. Headaches commenced pulses raced,
breathing in shallowed, and yet I pressed on through your
thought provoking, even handed discussions, and afterward I realized that
my persistence was because I trust you all, And thanks
to my trusting you all to present information and a

(42:41):
carefully considered, intellectually open and humane fashion, I knew you
wouldn't leave me curled up in a blubbering mass of
feminist anxiety. Thank you. A further note on pairing the
episodes as a social scientist, I'm used to viewing research
findings as information, not evil in themselves, but useful insofar

(43:03):
as they're interpreted through a properly critical lens. Cultivate use
of that lens in the populace, and we can trust
others to interpret and apply research fairly. Now, thanks to
the fact that your sex spot episode followed the ovulation
research episode, I'm beginning to wonder if I can abandon
my usual pearl clutching response to sex bot technology in

(43:24):
favor of a similar stance. Technology is an inherently evil
I must work on trusting its consumers, especially when all
those therapeutic uses of it are involved. This is fascinating stuff.
Thanks for bringing me around to it. Awesome. Well, yeah,
that's it's always well, I mean, it's always great to
hear that we handled something with the appropriate to of care.

(43:48):
Like certainly that's what we try to do. And yeah,
anytime we can we can help somebody look at a
topic in a slightly different light. I mean, that's that's gold.
I mean, that's kind of the experience of putting together
the show is that we, at least in my experience,
I'm always going into a topic thinking I'm more or
less have a handle on it and then finding some

(44:09):
some new perspective. Uh that that changes though the way
I view it more and more lately, I keep coming
back to the idea that maybe our two word tagline
should be there's more there always is. That. That's what
I find out in almost every time we do an episode. Yeah,
you know, in these two topics, I was genuinely pretty
nervous about covering them, but I felt like they were

(44:30):
necessary to cover for. We talked about it in the
episode as to why, but uh so it's I do
want to share a story. Like like maybe a week
after they published, I just happened to be talking to
some random people and they were asking, hey, well, what's
your show doing this week? And I said, oh, we're
talking about sex robots and they went, oh yeah, and

(44:51):
I was like, well, it's actually not like that. It's
you know, it's it's actually like they're used for therapeutic
purposes to help people and come on broth, Yeah exactly.
The response and it was like, it's kind of like
when you look at like Playboy for the letters, Am
I right? And I was like, no, no, that's not
And then I like it really hit me. I was like, wow,

(45:12):
we really did everything we could to not not be that.
I imagine that is what listeners, like Julie we're fearing,
you know, that there would just be like these kind
of like dudes in a spa like slapping each other
on the back, talk about spots. Wait a minute, what's
where's the spot? Don't you go to the dude spot?
I don't know what you're talking about. Have I been

(45:32):
locked out of the dude spot? Is this why I
don't understand dude culture? Carney and I go all the
time and slap each other on the back. No, But
like you know, it just made me feel like, oh wow,
Like I I feel like maybe we really did give
that the care that was necessary for And then Julie's
email came in right after that. It really made me
feel a lot better. All right, well, let's not pat
ourselves on the back too much. Now we're total scumbags.

(45:56):
I do like how Carney has that bit of of
actual human flesh on his back slapping purposes, but it's
really nice. It gets sweaty, especially in the spot. It
makes a nice sound like throwing a piece of meat
down on a cutting board. Yeah, alright, Well to shift
to another one. We got a couple of emails in
response to our episode on the science of guessing. Now.
Robert and I talked about the method of firmi estimation,

(46:19):
which is a really cool trick you can use to
try to come up with numerical guesses based on very
little starting information, And this was the topic I thought
was pretty cool. But we also talked about the idea
of guessing being a skill, how there are some people
who are just better at guessing than others. And at
the end of the episode, one of the things I

(46:39):
talked about was wondering if there is such a thing
as as as sort of athleticism of guessing in the
same way that when you are shooting hoops in basketball,
you're doing math. You're not consciously doing math, but your
body is somehow doing maths. You're trying to calculate perfect
arc trajectories. And I wondered if some people might be

(47:01):
good at guessing even without knowing tricks like fermi estimation
or knowing much information. They're just good at doing some
kind of intuitive, unconscious math that helps them get to
the right answer more often than other people do. And
our listener Jonathan writes in about that subject, Jonathan says, Joe,
you were so close to acknowledging a phenomenon that I

(47:23):
once wrote about after your excellent episode on P versus
n P. And that was when we did last year.
If you want to go check it out. This isn't
Jonathan Strickland. No, it's not. It's a different Jonathan this,
Jonathan writes in fairly often, or at least we've gotten
several emails from him. What if only our colleagues wrote
us letters We never knew it the whole time. The
last person was Julie. That could have been Julie Douglas. Oh,

(47:44):
I don't think so. Letters from our colleagues would contain
way more complaints about how nasty our desks are. All right, So,
Jonathan says, uh, this is not currently a fashionable concept,
But how about just as a hypothesis to consider it?
There exists in higher animals, especially in humans, a mode
of cognition that is distinct from intelligence. It may be

(48:07):
identical or similar to the method of how a foul
shot is executed, as you used in an example, or
even something beyond that. At the very least, it could
be an instantaneous synthesis of perceptible information that was accumulated
largely unconsciously. On the more extreme end, it could be
a sensitivity to information in our environment that is more

(48:28):
subtle than science in ten can detect. This sounds like
I'm shading off into magic, but consider phenomenons such as
how birds may migrate by sensitivity to Earth's magnetic field.
It's not inconceivable that humans can detect environmental information that's
currently not measurable and synthesize it in a process that
feels unconscious, since the conscious part of the mind isn't

(48:51):
privy to its generation, may feel random, sort of colloquially
called using your right brain. Great podcast, as always, and
then he also recommends to us a weekly podcast by
the BBC called no such Thing as a Fish. So
maybe we'll take a look at that. Sounds good, But yeah,
what do y'all think about what Jonathan's suggesting here? It

(49:12):
sounds plausible to me. I mean, I think that there's
like lots of aspects of how cognition works that we
are barely just scratching the surface of now Totally. There's
a lot about how the mind works that we don't
understand and and I do take very seriously that the
idea um you said is something distinct from intelligence. But

(49:32):
maybe one way you could put it is that there
are many multiple kinds of intelligence, and that some forms
of intelligence are not conscious. You don't think about thinking
through them to reach the conclusions you do, and yet
they do reach conclusions that influence your behavior. Is very
much related to the episode you and I did on
animal intelligence a couple of months ago. Oh yeah, it
could be the multiple different kinds of intelligence and intelligences

(49:54):
that may not be understandable to their own owners, intelligences
that may not be understandable from the outside. I'm actually
I'm into that. I'm more skeptical of the idea that
there's environmental information that is influencing our brains that uh
I think you might have put it that science in
seventeen can't measure. I'm totally open to. Of course, there's

(50:18):
a there's a whole lot we don't know scientifically about
the world yet. But I would think if there are
some kind of energetic influences that are acting on our brains,
they'd be measurable in some way. We might not understand
what they are or what they're doing. But I would
I would find it hard to believe they would be
not detectable in any scientific way, because if they're acting

(50:38):
on the brain, they're doing something, and by doing something,
that should mean they're detectable. Joe, you just don't want
to believe you're the Scully. Uh well, I mean I
take that as a compliment. I do love Scully, but um,
we need more Scullies. I'm the Scully who does want
to believe. Plus that you're like Scully postseason five? Is

(51:03):
that is that when it happens? That sounds kind of
like after the movie. I think is where she starts
like being more open to the idea of the paranormal.
I'm the Scully that's in The Fall, that's depressing. How
about the Scully that's in Hannibal that's exciting. Yeah, I
still haven't made it to that. All right, we just

(51:23):
have a couple left here. This next one comes to
us from Jim, who Jim is is pretty o G.
He's been writing for quite a while, always, always great emails.
Has he been writing since Allison was I think he
may have even before me and Allison back in the
proto day when it was just Carney. It was just Carney,
and then Carney brought in two piles of a sentient

(51:46):
goop and those were the original hosts. And then that's
what the listeners say when they always say it was
better with the other hosts. They would better with the goop.
Bring back the sentient goop. Okay, I guess I should
take it personally, all right. This one again comes from
Jim Jim Wrightson and says, Hi, guys, I listened to
your luck Guessing podcast this morning. This is the FIRMI

(52:07):
estimation bodies we've been talking about. Uh, I know, I'm
a bit behind. I had a few thoughts. It reminded
me of two sayings. First, the harder I work, the
luckier I get. And then second, luck is when preparation
meets opportunity. The first one is kind of like, what
is it they say? God helps those who help themselves. Yeah,
As for lucky people, is it really luck or just chance?

(52:29):
Would you consider someone who could flip a fair coin
heads thirty times in a row lucky? What if you
gave everyone on the planet a coin and asked them
to flip as long as they got all heads. Since
there are about seven billion people, on the planet, about
seven or eight people should do it. We don't know
who those seven to eight people would be. They won't

(52:50):
have any special talent, but they will appear well outside
of the norms. This sort of goes back to something
we did on I think maybe the first episode I
ever did of Stuff to Blow your Mind, which was
about the science of coincidence, where we're talking about how
many things that appear to be these great coincidences are
not in fact all that remarkable. For example, if there
are lots of trials you're not conscious of. Uh. You know,

(53:11):
the law of large numbers is something you watch somebody
flip heads thirty times in a row. It's like, that's impossible,
it's crazy. But if they're the only person who did
it this year or something, then you know somebody had
to do it. I run into this a lot with
dungeons and dragons. You know, it's it's if if someone
has an advantage and they were like two twenties in

(53:32):
a row, which you know is the critical hit, everyone's
just floored. Uh, And then you start thinking, well, there's
synchronicity going on here, there's something deeper at play. But
you've rolled so many times and not done that. I've
actually played games where people start to get paranoid where
they think that they're dices somehow like poorly made or
loaded their own way, because it's it's constantly rolling a

(53:54):
natural one, which leads to automatic failure. I think I've
seen of a meme online where people have like done
done dice shaming in the same way that you would
have a dog hold not hold a sign, but a
dog with a sign around its neck that says, you know, I,
you know, pooped on the floor whatnot, Well, they would
shame the dice like I I rolled a one on one.

(54:16):
My my character was trying to to swing on a
vine across the never n care or something. But also
Jim later in his email talked about this thought experiment
Robert and I did, or we tried to do a
piece of FIRMI estimation some rough estimation to come up
with the answer to the question in the United States
how much hair in total gets cut off of people's

(54:38):
heads every year. I liked how we had another listener
who I don't have their name, but they they commented
that it was clear that neither of us had ever
had very long hair. They sent our estimate estimates regarding
care something mass. Our estimate could have been way off,
but I think Jim only comes off with about one
order of magnitude different. So let's let's hear what Jim
has to say. He says quote, I have another idea

(55:00):
about the weight of hair. I would do the estimate
based upon the following assumptions. One, people tend to keep
their hair roughly the same length overall, even if they
vary how often they get it cut. Two hair tends
to grow about six inches in one year. And three
we could estimate how much six inches of hair on
one head would be. I think a six inch ponytail
would be about right, as in the kind that are

(55:22):
donated for the real hair wigs for cancer patients. I
don't have any to way, but let's assume they are
about two ounces. That times three million Americans gives me
thirty seven million pounds are almost nineteen thousand tons. I
don't remember your estimate. Using another estimate technique for the
same problem tends to reinforce estimates. I don't remember where
I read this, but it was about estimating how much

(55:44):
water flows through the Mississippi River in a year using
two techniques. One choose a location on the river and
estimated the the amount of water through that section based
upon the rivers with depth and speed. The other estimate
was based upon the size of the Mississippi River Bay
sit in rainfall. Both estimates were pretty close to each other,
and the assumption was that two approximations confirmed each other.

(56:07):
This is interesting because this is another thing we talked
about in the episode, how multiple different estimates can help
average each other out. So one of the things that
firm the estimation relies upon is that if you're if
you're coming up with rough guesses for numbers to calculate
some unknown number, even if you're wrong on one number,

(56:27):
it might help balance it if you're wrong in the
opposite direction for a different number. So maybe you overestimate
how much the average amount of hair ways, but you
underestimate how much of it gets cut off and each
given haircut or something like that. Uh So if you
if you have enough of these things competing against each other,
they should help sort of average you toward the correct answer.

(56:51):
Jim also points out in his email this interesting problem
in game theory known as the sheriff's dilemma, which is
essentially a problem where you use a game theory payoff
mate riecks to determine whether or not you should shoot
somebody based on little information. You just pitched this as
a story recently, I did. I took Jim's idea. If
it's going to get picked up, I don't know. I
hope so they make an article out of it. It

(57:12):
reminds me of playing Werewolf, which of course involves some
of these uh these these these ideas. Wait what the
payoff to payoff matrix for shooting somebody? Um werewolf for
Mafia of course, the social game where oh I see
where somebody's a werewolf for somebody. I don't really like
the Mafia version. I don't think it really holds up well.

(57:34):
And maybe I just prefer I did not know the
werewolf version. This is I've only ever heard of Mafia,
and I used to be a pretty serious Mafia player.
Oh that's good, Okay. So Jim came up with thirty
seven million pounds of hair, and we came up with
a hundred and twelve million pounds of hair getting cut
every year. So our estimates, our estimates are just one

(57:54):
order of magnitude apart. That's not too bad, uh, and
your guests. Of course, Jim's guests might be better than ours.
So I told Jim, I like your methodology, but I
didn't know that figure that hair grows an average of
six inches a year. Yeah, I heard that, and I
immediately thought, my hair grows way more than that. I've
never heard this, so I don't know how accurate it

(58:15):
is or anything. But I think also, Robert, you and
I could have gone wrong by seriously overestimating the mass
of the average head of hair. I think we guessed
about a quarter of a pound, which in retrospect sounds
really high. And I'm thinking I fell victim to the
availability heuristic. That's where you, you know, make a bad
choice based on some particular example in your mind that's

(58:37):
easily retrievable. And when I was guessing the average head
of human hair, I had in my mind a picture
of a man with what looks like five pounds of dreadlocks.
So that was probably edging my average estimate too high.
And looking back, maybe maybe we should say two ounces
of hair instead of a quarter pound. I don't know,
but anyway, one other way we could reinforce as if

(58:59):
this number really mattered all that much is to average
our estimates with Jim. So the the the average between
Jim's estimate and hours to be somewhere around seventy million
pounds of hair getting cut every year. I also mentioned
to Jim that when I got his email, I had
just gotten my hair cut the other day and I
forgot to ask my barber if if she had any

(59:20):
input on this information. You're going to ask your barber
to wear your hair without explaining anything, wouldn't that be
great a scale? Yeah, I need you to weigh my hair.
Oh man, this is great because I'm I'm often in
need of of small talk when I go to get
my hair cut, and it can be awkward. Huh. And
theys are going to the wrong barber because that's part

(59:45):
of the gig. Man, They've got to keep the conversation flowing. Well,
not talk at all and not make you feel any pressure. Well, yeah,
they need to know when you are not interested in talking.
I generally, I generally go into a meditative state during
my hair cut, like there's something vidic stage No, no no,
not kind of tonic, but just very I get very relaxed.
It's kind of what it's like a sensory deprivation tech. Yeah,

(01:00:09):
it's the it's like a SMR. It's it's very much
like that, like very much like a SMR. Like I
just kind of doze out. I'm probably the worst person
to I mean, I'm easily moved into different positions, um,
but but I'm not a great talker because I just
zone out completely. Your head's lolling back and forth. Yeah.
But one of the first a SMR videos I ever

(01:00:30):
saw was somebody pretending to cut your hair. I think
that's a big one, isn't it. Yeah, yeah, totally works
on me. By the way, I know the audience is
probably going, what the hell's a SMR. We've done brain
stuff videos about this in the past and then stuff
to Blow your Mind videos in the past. But there's
an older podcast episode about Okay, so yeah, I had
an over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com

(01:00:52):
um or how stuff Works. I think they may have
a straight up episode there, if not videos, and you
can type in SMR and see what happens. Yeah, it's
totally fascinating. All right. I got one more here, and
this is from our recent episode about the demon Haunted Mind.
And this is the episode where Robert and I took
a look at a recently published academic paper that found
a correlation between people who believe in demons and negative

(01:01:16):
mental illness. So this comes from I'm actually gonna leave
this name anonymous, but they say as a psychology professional
and having an amateur interest in religion. I am a
nonden denominational Christian. This episode was super interesting to me.
On one hand, I can agree with what the study said,
On another, I completely disagree with it. Religion is definitely

(01:01:39):
something slightly different to all people. I've been around demonic possessions,
what you could call exorcism, spiritual healing is another term,
depending on the circle, and enough strange things that science
definitely could not explain. That being said, I have rarely
seen or heard from myself much that has happened. Most
has been right before or right after I was present,

(01:02:01):
only to be corroborated by multiple witnesses. I have never
sought demons and don't need to see demonic presences to
know the spiritual world exists. This is important to keep
in mind. I believe the Bible gives a decent explanation
of this, and I have heard other people explain it
in this way, if you go looking for something, you

(01:02:21):
will find it. The Bible says seek and ye shall find,
and that's in Luke eleven nine. And then he also
quotes an evil in adulterous generation seeks for a sign,
which is in Matthews sixteen four. This verse outlines those
that go looking for a sign specifically as proof they
will find it, but generally in a negative way. The

(01:02:42):
reasoning is a little complicated for email, but the basics
looks something like this. In psychological terms, demons are not
seen as academic. In almost every case, they are evil
and are a belief. Therefore, by making the decision to
look for them, the negative infects your mind. It has
been well documented what focus on negative issues can do

(01:03:06):
to people. In some cases, this could be so extreme
as to produce multiple mental issues. I have my own views,
religious and personal on this, but I won't share them here.
This is just a basic idea that seems to be
true in my personal and professional life. So I mean,
I think what I'm hearing outside of what this person's

(01:03:28):
actual belief system is lines up with the study to
me from what like I remember from their correlations that
it wasn't actually that like demons were influencing you somehow,
but that it was that because you were prone to
having a cynical world view, you were subsequently attracted to
the idea of demons and negative mental health as a

(01:03:53):
maybe totally obvious or too obvious to state thing. I mean,
obviously having demon obsessed ideation could lead to the belief
that someone is possessed by demons. Yeah. Well, one of
the things that's interesting about this study is that they
also showed that just like the belief in demons may
correlate with mental health problems, but that doesn't mean necessarily

(01:04:16):
that mental health problems correlate with the belief in demons.
That makes sense, uh, though, I mean, I wouldn't want
to sell short the influence of this person's religious beliefs.
Reading this email, I strongly get the sense that this
person believes demons are real. Yeah, they said at the top,
they said amateur interest in religion, but it certainly sounded
a lot more in depth than what I would think of. Well,

(01:04:38):
I'm also amature. I'm also reminded of the episodes that
we did about Incubined subcuby and and and and I
think we've touched on on witchcraft persecution in other episodes
as well, but they're There are a few theories in fact,
one from the author Walter Stevens who wrote this book
Demon Lovers that we refer to, and he makes an

(01:05:00):
argument that a lot of what was going on in
the persecution of which is is this this desire in
a time of of a faltering faith, uh, this desire
for there to be a proof of the supernatural that
like carnal proof, like physical proof, like this is where
the supernatural realm touches us and improves its reality. And

(01:05:22):
if demons are real, then God is real as well. Yeah,
so demons aren't. It wasn't just strongly religious people trying
to act out their religious fervor, but it was people
who were afraid that God might not exist and thinking
that if demons, if you can show demonic possession, you
can know that God is real. And so yeah, that's

(01:05:43):
really interesting. One thing I would pick up on this
email is UH trying to reason about the presence of
demon possession or the reality of demon possession from the
idea of UH seeing things that science definitely could not explain.
I'm always like, I don't, how do you know you

(01:06:04):
hear people say that about things that can't be publicly investigated,
but whenever it's something that can be publicly investigated, suddenly
it gets way less uh deterministic about whether science can't
explain it. I think future pronouncements that this science will
never be able to explain this thing I saw. I
don't think there's a good basis for saying that. Well,

(01:06:24):
I do want to point out to the outside of
this letter, we received a lot of listener mail about
this particular episode, and a lot of you shared your
personal experiences with us, and you know, unfortunately, because of
how much time we have for these listener mail episodes,
we couldn't read them all. This one was interesting to
me primarily because it was from a psychology professional. Um,

(01:06:45):
but we did hear from I would say at least ten,
if not more, people about their personal experiences both with
the belief in demons and with mental illness and how
the two connected. Uh so, yeah, I mean, I don't
know necessarily from like I see exactly what you're saying.
I can see how from like a subjective standpoint, it

(01:07:07):
feels like science couldn't explain something that you've seen, but
like you could say the same thing, and that's not
to take away from the power of it and your
personal experience or in your life. Yeah. Absolutely, um, But
then like you could have said the same thing about
I don't know astronomy a thousand years ago, right, So um,

(01:07:27):
I'm not quite so sure. But I also like this
person seems to have like an interest in the empirical
but also in the spiritual that like are sort of
rubbing up against one another. That's probably why this episode
clicked for them. And I do want to mention that
we've mentioned this before, but anytime we discuss supernatural experience, uh,

(01:07:48):
we never We're never doubting the the experience, the and
and the the feelings that are associated with it, the
the you know, trauma or you know serious a sensation
of enlightenment like that, that is all valid. It's it's
what is causing the experience. Uh. And And I feel
like most of the time, if not all of the time,

(01:08:11):
you can point to some very valid explanations that are
that are very much in keeping with our understanding of
the natural world and in the human mind. But I
would also say that even going beyond that, not being
aware of a current valid explanation rooted in natural science.
Also is not a proof that you have experienced a
demon or a ghost. I did want to say something

(01:08:33):
else that this this email was interesting to me in
multiple ways, so I really appreciate the person who wrote
it writing in but the idea about warnings against investigation
of the demonic, like that seems a very interesting and
intellectually fertile soil as well, like the idea of uh
interpreting certain Bible verses to say that if you go

(01:08:57):
after looking for evidence of the demonic, if you want
to try to investigate it in this academic way, you
are asking for trouble. Yeah. Um, that that's something that
we came across in the Exorcism Addercism episode as well.
Depending on like what particular religious beliefs you have, there
are that that's in line with some of them that
it's like you just shouldn't think about this, don't look

(01:09:20):
behind the curtain. But I mean that's also you could look.
I'm not saying that the person writing the this email
has this motive in mind, but you could also say
similar things to just discourage investigation of a phenomenon that
would ultimately make it look mundane. Yeah. Well, and That's
one of the interesting things too about that study was

(01:09:42):
that it was one in a long line of studies
that had shown correlations between religious beliefs and mental health.
And there are positive ones too, as we mentioned in
the episode, like belief in the Loving God or belief
in prayer, things like that lead to positive mental health. Uh. So,
you know, it's just interesting kind of like looking at
how they all weigh together, Like which things do you

(01:10:04):
choose to think about? Which things do you not? And
I don't know if you decide that based upon what
the the canonical writings or your religion are or or
something else. I'll just say this, do not look into
the world of demons. Do not investigate the world of
demons unless you want to discover so many wonderful films,

(01:10:25):
pieces of literature, uh, compositions, music, so many wonderful pieces
of art. Um, it's all of Robertspidy and the campaigns. Yeah,
Denis and Dragons has so many devils and demons. Uh. Yeah,
there's there's so much wonderful stuff out there. I can't imagine, uh,
my life if I had not decided to to look
into them. And as we talked about in the episode,

(01:10:47):
when you were a little kid, you and I had
the same thing where we would be like Sunday School
and you would say, hey, I want to know more
about this revelations. It says like all these demons and
legions are gonna come to show up. And the people
would be like, don't don't worry about that. Let's let's
get more to the caring part. And that's I think
that's kind of valid advices. There's always in Sunday School
a little bit of steering you to the parts of

(01:11:07):
the Bible they want you to focus on. Al Right, Well,
on that note, let's go ahead and close it up.
We'll leave everyone out there to either pursue the demons
or the caring, whichever one you want to do. Hopefully
you'll make room for both in your life. Um, as usual,
head on over to Stuff to Well your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's what we'll find all of
the blog post, podcast videos, and links out to our

(01:11:31):
various social media accounts. That's right, And if you want
to write us the old fashioned way, you can get
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is

(01:11:53):
it how stuff works dot com lia I think they
try to start about the proper part far F