0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So, let’s square the strange.

BR: Welcome back beloved listeners, this is Ben here.

Pascual Romero: And Pascual.

BR: We’re going to be talking about all sorts of strangeness this week here on Squaring the Strange. But we’re going to begin with, what are you skeptical of? Or as we call it in the biz, Swayso.

PR: So, this week I was on Facebook and a couple of my friends shared this article from YourNewswire.com.

0:01:02
BR: I’ve heard of them. They have multiple Pulitzers, right?

PR: Yeah, I believe so. Their slogan is News. Truth. Unfiltered.

BR: Hey, boom, done. Mic drop.

PR: I believe you.

BR: It must be good. I believe you and I’m going to have to.

BR: All those periods! I mean, you know, it’s the emphasis, it’s just truth, justice, unfiltered. Boom!

PR: Yeah, those full stops are key in conveying the amount of truth and unfiltered news their conveying. And with that said, the article reads, women absorb and retain DNA from every man they have sex with.

BR: Okay, I’m, I’m skeptical. But, but I have not read news dot truth dot unfiltered. So dot. So so I have not I haven’t been privy to this capital T truth, so enlighten us if you would.

0:02:04
PR: Okay, so I’m not going to read the whole article, mainly because it is an abomination of journalism, but also because it’s just kind of long-winded. Without actually getting into any of the real evidence why they come up with this headline, but they talk a lot, and like a lot of people do in the world of Woo. But they said, so it kind of reads, they said a new study by the University of Seattle and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. So it’s actually, these are two different studies, so they already kind of are misrepresenting that. It’s not a new study, it’s two studies.

0:02:43
Also, they’re not new. One is from 2012 and the other is from 2005.

BR: But the question, to be fair, the question is can we rehash this? Can we dig it up again, put a little fairy dust on it and repackage it, old wine, new bottles? And apparently you get a sexy headline like that, who’s not going to click on it?

PR: Yeah, bottled lightning, man. They got it. And so what they say, they say, “the study which discovered the startling information by accident”, which, well, I’ll get into why that is not true at all, “was originally trying to determine if women who have been pregnant with a son might be more predisposed to certain neurological diseases that occur more frequently in males”.

0:03:27
Well, the way the article reads, it says, but as the scientists picked apart the female brain, the study began to veer wildly off course, which is also not true. It didn’t veer wildly off course. So the study, they said, “female brains often harbor male microchimerism, or in other words, the presence of male DNA that originated from another individual and are genetically distinct from the cells that make up the rest of the woman. According to the study, 63% of females, 37 of 59 tested, harbored male microchimerism in the brain.

0:04:01
Male microchimerism was present in multiple brain regions. 63% of women carry male DNA cells that live in their brains”, according to this article.

BR: Shocking! Shocking! Okay.

PR: So, and they say, obviously, the researchers wanted to know where it came from. That may be true, not necessarily covered in the study. So, kind of, this is where we just have to get to the too long, didn’t read part. To sum it up, they said basically, they start the next paragraph by saying, anyone care to guess?

0:04:37
Well, that’s what this article does. So it just guesses. It’s…

BR: We shall speculate. We have few of any hard scientific answers, so we’re going to speculate for the next thousand words.

PR: Yeah. So, microchimerism, typically, this is a real thing. It’s where you find male DNA inside of a woman, and it is often in the brain. It can also be found in other parts of the body.

0:05:02
And the vast majority of the time, this is from being pregnant with a male.

BR: Which you would expect.

PR: Yeah, and it’s because there’s a lot of exchange of cells and fluids and things where it gets, you know, you basically are bathed in each other’s hormones and DNA and, you know, that’s pregnancy.

BR: Women carry the children. That’s kind of how that works.

PR: So it is quite expected. Now, there are some other situations where that may happen. Twins, they found that twins, male-female twins, the female will carry the male genes, they will express some microchimerism. There are also some sibling components, like if there was a male first, and then a female baby, the female baby may also.

0:05:48
So there’s a lot of reasons. There are a number of reasons why this may happen. The one that the study really doesn’t seem to point at is having sex with males. And…

BR: But isn’t that the headline?

PR: Yeah, exactly.

BR: Oh, okay. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss that.

PR: At this point, the scientists really didn’t have any, they didn’t necessarily know what was going on with finding microchimerism in 63% because they weren’t really set out to figure out the whys of it. They were just figuring out if the microchimerism correlated with diseases. And that was pretty much the extent of that first study.

0:06:28
They stated that possible sources of the male DNA cells were from an abortion, not necessarily an actual procedure, but spontaneous abortion, which a pretty significant number of pregnancies do end in. And most of the time before the woman even knows she was pregnant. The male twin that in a situation where they didn’t know that, or they didn’t have a living twin could have been a male twin that may have taken, may have been viable at the first, you know, around conception but didn’t make it.

BR: Reabsorbed?

PR: Yeah, essentially. And that can happen.

0:07:08
It can get absorbed into the fetus. It can get absorbed back into the mother. There’s a lot of, so that, there could have been the genes and the DNA in there at that time and then it disappeared. An older brother that transferred it as I mentioned before and then and then they kind of at the end of that list they say sexual intercourse as a possibility. Now, there’s no further study on this. That was just a complete Shot in the dark or maybe not shot in the dark, but just a complete, you know, guess there’s It’s not even a hypothesis. There was no basis for it. They just said possibly right I mean

BR: and that’s how scientists work. You say, well, this is the effect, these are the possible causes. As we’ve talked about in this program, science is never 100% certain. All information is tentative and subject to the information we have now.

0:07:54
They would be remiss if they didn’t include it, no matter how remote or unlikely.

PR: Sure, and it’s not to say that it seems impossible. I mean, it sounds like what they’re kind of trying to suggest is it is possible that through the exchange of body fluids that you would possibly retain some genetic material from the person. But again, there’s no study to back this up. That was just part of the list of possibilities, three of which actually have a pretty good amount of scientific basis for, one of which was basically like the I better throw it out there just in case someone calls me out on it kind of thing.

0:08:29
So the article after listing all this stuff says considering the fact that 63% of women have male DNA in the recesses of their brain. Now remember this is 63% of the women studied specifically for this study. So they were looking for microchimerism to begin with.

BR: What’s the N on this, like 39 or something?

PR: It was, let’s see, yeah we had 63% were 37 of 59 tested. Okay, so very, pretty small sample size. You know, I don’t know how broad that sample size was, how ethnically diverse it was, or geographically.

0:09:01
So we don’t really have that info. I’m sure it’s in the paper, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, it was behind a paywall, so I could only read the abstract and the conclusion. Basically, the very next thing they say after that list of possibilities, they say, what do you think is the most likely origin of the male DNA? Now here’s where they… Let’s just get right into throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It says the first three options apply to a very small percentage of women.

0:09:30
Possibly, but I don’t know where they’re getting that information from. Very small percentage of women, sure, maybe an abortion, you know, a spontaneous abortion when they say an abortion, women didn’t know about, obviously. A male twin that vanished, an older brother transferred. We don’t know that that’s a very small percentage. There’s no way to really even pull that information and that information was not explored in the study.

BR: It’s not in the original study, so therefore your speculation is entirely speculative.

PR: Yeah, shooting from the hip. And again, and honestly, if you were to throw those four options at me, I would probably say number three, an older brother transferred by the maternal circulation, would probably be the most likely reason it showed up.

0:10:21
Again, total guess, but if you gave me that list and just asked me to pick one that seemed likely, that’s the one I would pick. But no, no, they say the answer is four sex. And now this is where it just, it kind of, I mean, it goes really off the rails.

BR: This is where it goes off the rails. Yeah, okay. In case you’re wondering, folks, this is where this whole thing went off the rails.

0:10:40
PR: Yep, so it says, every male you absorb spermatozoa from becomes a living part of your life. No one said anything about absorbing spermatozoa and also living part of you for life.

BR: This is bad writing, for one thing.

PR: Yeah, weird wording. And as far as I know, I did a little bit of armchair research. There is not a lot of evidence to suggest that sperm does anything but die off if it doesn’t penetrate the egg. And the only thing sperm is designed to penetrate, or not designed rather, but evolved to penetrate, is an egg. That’s it. It doesn’t go through the walls of the vagina, it doesn’t go into the uterus and penetrate those walls.

0:11:16
BR: Unless it’s Superman sperm.

PR: Yeah, true, true. And in which case you’re going to die.

BR: Right, that would be, yeah. Moving on.

PR: But yeah, so now it’s suggesting that sperm finds its way into your body and just kind of takes up residence.

BR: It becomes part of you. Yes. In a terrifying, horror film way.

PR: Yep. And it says, some have been carrying the living male DNA inside them for well over 50 years. Again, that information is not in the studies, either study.

0:11:53
In fact, they talk about the first study, but there’s a second study that’s mentioned in here, which makes it even more confusing. It says, sperm is alive. It is living cells. When it is injected into you, it swims and swims until it crashes headlong into a wall, and then it attaches and burrows into your flesh. If it’s in your mouth, it swims and climbs into your nasal passages.

BR: I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works.

0:12:17
PR: Inner ear and behind your eyes, then digs in. It enters your bloodstream and collects in your brain and spine. So, I’ll give a quick breakdown of the two papers. So, the first paper was in the PLOS1 Public Library of Science, peer-reviewed journal, very reputable journal. It was titled, Male Microchimerism in the Human Female Brain.

0:12:44
It was led by William F.N. Chan and about half a dozen other doctors. It was published September 26, 2012. Paper one, it found 63% microchimerism in the, that’s the 59 women. No mention of how many had a son. That was, it’s not in the paper. That doesn’t talk about, so that already makes it hugely problematic. 59 people, there’s an entirely plausible chance that you could get 63% of them that are parents.

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BR: Easily.

PR: Easily. So, you know, and especially within certain age groups. And I believe, you know, this also didn’t really say much about things like, or at least the part that I read didn’t talk about their ages or anything, so I don’t know how they selected them. One person was described as never having a living offspring in the study. So there was one person that they said didn’t have a living offspring, and that doesn’t account for anything.

0:13:46
They may have, again, twin in the womb, older brother, possibly spontaneous abortion, possibly sought an abortion themselves.

BR: Or living offspring, I mean, strictly speaking, they could have died in a car accident.

PR: Yeah, precisely. I mean, and? Yeah, and so, and then there’s no mention of abortions induced or spontaneous in the entire study. So, it doesn’t require any, it really doesn’t require an explanation other than pregnancy.

0:14:14
I mean, we don’t even need to seek out additional possibilities in that case because 63% is not unlikely. If it were 99%, maybe we could talk, but again, then we’d have to talk about how they selected their people and everything.

BR: And again, this study is five years old.

PR: Yeah, it’s already five years old, and of course, you know, this article acted like it just came out.

BR: Breaking news!

PR: The second study they cited, and I’m not sure how, this is sort of where it looked like they were trying, I think that the angle they were trying to sell, they were probably trying to pull from the first paper and didn’t quite have enough data, so they dug up something else to back them up.

0:14:57
This one was from the American Journal of Medicine titled Male Microchimerism in Women Without Sons, Quantitative Assessment and Correlation with Pregnancy History. This second study had a completely different set than the first. Separated the subjects according to whether they had female kids, abortions, or no reported pregnancy. So this study seems to be trying to figure out more of the source of the microchimerism.

0:15:28
Now, no reported pregnancies does not account for spontaneous abortion. In my reading up, it sounds like spontaneous abortion among all fertilization is about 30 to 50 percent. So this is an incredibly common thing. So most without women realizing they were pregnant in the first place. So it’s in the very early weeks of pregnancy.

BR: And therefore, even if you had self-reported measures, I mean, they might not be able to tell you.

0:16:04
So if you’re assuming that, well, these people didn’t say they had an abortion, well, that doesn’t mean anything. They may have a spontaneous abortion, not known it, and they’re telling you the truth, but they’re just wrong.

PR: Right. And I think that really is the most difficult part of even trying to study this. I mean, never mind the sensational headline and sperm burrowing its way through your body. I mean, trying to figure out the source of microchimerism is very difficult because it requires a lot of self-reporting and then it requires knowing something that is almost impossible to know for sure, especially if you take in mind that if 30 to 50 percent of women have experienced this in their lifetime, whether they knew it or not, I mean, it could be very tricky.

0:16:47
And the reason that that number is so broad is because it’s also tricky to even know, like, you know, how often does it really happen? And…

BR: science is hard, folks.

PR: Yeah, science is hard and it has to be honest with itself, which is why we have these kind of broad ideas that we can’t pin down. And the overall rate of microcrimerism in this group of women was actually 23%. And for women in the study who were never pregnant or only had female offspring, it was 10 and 9%. So women never pregnant, 10% expressed it, and then those with only female offspring, 9% expressed microchimerism.

0:17:26
So that also falls pretty well within what we’d expect in terms of these variables like spontaneous abortion. So it’s really pretty easy to tear this story apart.

BR: You saw it all over Facebook.

PR: Yeah, and I saw it shared a number of times, like a surprising number of times, by people who I would consider fairly socially progressive people, which kind of surprises me because I think the overall tone of this article, especially in the wording with this scary burrowing sperm thing, is that it’s really slut-shaming. It’s trying to use science to slut-shame because it’s saying every partner you’re with, it burrows through you and it affects you.

0:18:16
BR: There certainly is that tone.

PR: You don’t catch it right away, but when you look at the last sentence of the article says we are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourse.

BR: You know meaning you know we are only now learning just the dangers and how bad it is if you sleep with many men

PR: Yeah so ladies you know be lesbians is that what this is saying I don’t know because frankly I you know it I mean it really does to me I mean and that may just be my kinda progressive radar going off saying like are you are you slut shaming like sounds like you’re slut shaming.

0:18:52
So what has come across your skeptic news desk this week?

BR: So this week I’m going to be talking about a somewhat more somber subject. And that is the shooting a few weeks ago at a Republican baseball practice. One member of Congress was, well several people were shot and he was badly I think as of now he’s recovering but… And it was done by a man named James T Hutchinson and it was it was an interesting story I remember it happened I think on a on a Wednesday and I I had I was working and stuff and I don’t I don’t get on social media all the time. I check in every now and then and post something and share something around, but for the most part I’m working, so I don’t keep my pulse on it.

0:19:46
By the time I had come across it, I’d already been putting in a couple hours of work. What was interesting was that one of the first things that I saw being asked about was, why aren’t they calling it terrorism? And I saw this, I saw that comment on at least three or four of my Facebook friends. Who were saying, here’s this link, this guy shot five people at this baseball practice and apparently he was, he had, you know, he was a Bernie supporter and he was against Trump and as frankly, statistically, most of America is. If you look at, not the Bernie supporting, but if you look at the polls, statistically, most people are not in favor of Trump and his policies.

PR: In fact, at this point, I believe significantly more than what the popular vote reflected initially. So right now we’re looking at a pretty wide margin.

0:20:44
BR: Right. So the fact that he was anti-Trump, it’s not irrelevant, but that that doesn’t mean anything. Lots of anti-law people don’t shoot anybody. Right exactly within hours I saw people commenting in Outraged about why this was not being called here is

PR: yeah, I definitely

BR: Witness some you saw some that I want to unpack that because this happens fairly fairly often This is only a recent example. There’s many other ones, but it’s it’s it’s an ongoing issue that has been discussed discussed politics and culture for a while now. And it surfaces after many mass shootings. It happened after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. It happened in the Boston bombing. And unfortunately, by the time this airs, it may happen again.

0:21:29
So this is a recurring thing, so I wanted to spend a few minutes to unpack that. The first thing that I was looking at in terms of, you know, why aren’t they calling it terrorism is the question is, who’s they? Anybody? A reporter? The FBI agents? Someone in office? Who are you expecting to call it terrorism? Which, who are you thinking is going to formally and officially decree a given attack to be an act of terrorism? I mean the fact is that there is no official Office of Terrorism categorization. There is no single person or entity that’s responsible for calling an event terrorism or not in the hours after a shooting or attack. There just isn’t. That’s nobody’s job. And so what ends up happening is that there is sort of a default public public, you know, discussions and what’s going on here and looking to the news media. And in this case, it was interesting because someone actually was calling it terrorism within an hour or two. Illinois Congressman Rodney Davis was widely quoted as calling it, quote, “a political rhetorical terrorist act”. So it was odd seeing people on social media complaining that it wasn’t being called terrorism when in fact it was being characterized as terrorism by a prominent politician.

0:22:57
And so again, it’s like people are waiting for the president or the head of the FBI, well of course the current head of the FBI, he’s got his own things going on. He’s got problems. But the fact is that terrorism has a specific legal definition and many informal ones and there’s no single universally agreed upon definition of terrorism. You do find, I mean, there is, for example, federal law defines terrorism as acts that quote, “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or to affect the conduct of a government.” Now that covers a lot of ground that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population that want to affect the conduct of government. So in other words, what would not be an act of terrorism, for example, theoretically, would be somebody who has a grievance against a coworker, goes into post office and shoots up a coworker and leaves.

0:24:09
Now, part of the problem here, of course, is that determining why something was done is key to determining whether it’s an act of terrorism or not. That’s in the definition, right? What’s the purpose? Did you shoot up a Republican baseball team because you wanted the government to do something? Did you do it because you had a grievance with one particular official and others happened to be there? Who knows?

0:24:39
A shooter could have targeted someone for personal reasons, maybe a marital dispute, revenge. They asked for help and they didn’t get it, whatever else. Maybe innocent bystanders were there as well. Again, workplace killings an example like that. And you know I think a good skeptical media literacy rule of thumb is first reports are usually wrong. Right? So often in significant ways. So whatever you’re hearing in the first few hours should be taken with a grain of salt. Right? We all we all know this, right? This is why in the first few hours, whatever you’re hearing about, what the shooter did or said or thought may be true, may not be true.

0:25:28
PR: Those of us who remember the morning of 9-11, this is a very good example of how confusing and incorrect a lot of information was right out of the gates. People originally thought it was an accidental plane crash, and then the second one came, and then they didn’t know what was going on. And it took hours before, you know, even just the first…

BR: It took days for some things to be established.

PR: I mean, even just establishing that it was an attack was tricky. And you know, surprisingly so. Those actually remember, I was glued to my TV the whole day that day. And if you look at, in fact, the problem with the initial reports is that a lot of the conspiracy theories that have permeated since use the initial reports as an example of, oh, well, they changed the story.

0:26:11
BR: Exactly.

PR: And so, yeah, and so, like you’re saying, initial reports are usually incorrect.

BR: No, that’s exactly, and you know, and it could be any number of reasons, you know. Witnesses can be mistaken, they can be confused, they thought they saw something, they didn’t see something. So, you know, the fact is that investigating an event enough to determine motive can take hours, days, or weeks, or months.

BR: Are we rolling?

0:26:46
PR: Yeah.

BR: Hello, is this on? Yep. Can you hear me in the back? Hello?

PR: Back in my day you could hear people in the back! So we are gonna be talking about nostalgia this week.

BR: Oh those were the days…

PR: I remember when I used to be nostalgic But yeah, we’re kind of gonna cover a kind of a wide range of ideas that have to do with nostalgia And also, you know, why why would we be skeptical of nostalgia? But you know so we’re gonna be talking a little bit about the good old days as people like to use it as people especially nowadays with the make America great again thing like to pull it out. We’re gonna talk a little bit about something very near and dear to me Which is is art and music really worse nowadays than it used to be

BR: Yes it is, dammit! Kids today…

PR: And we’ll talk a little bit about how these mentalities happen and and what truth there is to, if any, to any of these claims.

0:27:41
So Ben, I see this book sitting on the desk and I love the title of it. It says, The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible.

BR: No, you have to do it like, The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible.

PR: Perfect, perfect.

BR: Yes, it’s a book by Otto Bettman, who is the founder of the Bettman Archives, one of the world’s best known photo archive repositories. And yeah, I got this book a couple years ago, I think at a library book sale. In fact, it still has a sticker on it.

PR: One dollar, that’s an amazing price for that book.

BR: Yeah, you know, I am a fan of books. And one of the reasons I love it is that it’s a 200 page book and it looks at the good old days and the false nostalgia of it. It covers everything from drinking to vice to factory work to street crime, public health, working conditions, that sort of thing.

0:28:41
It’s fascinating just how horrific life was not too long ago, a hundred years ago and even less than that. You know, you look at the, you know, you had in 1873, for example, a half million people lived in New York slums. Just squalid conditions. And some still do. You know, and you know, but you look at, you know, by so many measures, you look, you know, there’s accounts of, you know, 10 year olds working on farms and in factories. Working, you know, people worked 16 hours a day, oftentimes for little or nothing.

0:29:22
Now, of course, you know, the economy’s changed, and so, you know, by today’s standards, but it’s still virtually nothing. You have, you know, street crime all over the place. You have, you look at the, you read accounts of, stories of New York City being clogged with horse dung. Piled high on the streets, right? And this is the car, which people complain about the pollution from cars these days. The car was the savior.

0:29:48
Because the streets in cities like Boston and New York and Chicago were three feet high with horse shit. Because horse-drawn carriages, that’s how you got around. So, you know, you have just by so many measures, sanitation, food adulteration. There’s this notion that the good old days were the bright shining, you know, beacons of purity and easy life are just absurd.

PR: So now that we’ve kind of laid the foundation of why it really sucked at those periods of time. We maybe talk a little bit about some of the ideas that people have in terms of the good old days. Maybe we can look back a little more recently.

0:30:37
I know a lot of the nostalgia these days kind of goes back to the 50s post-economic boom and what we see in Leave It to Beaver. And the way people kind of idealize these periods. And I think that to me the 50s is kind of the most present one because there was a great deal of prosperity in this country. But there’s a lot of sweeping everything else under the rug when you’re remembering it that way.

BR: Also, the Cold War and lots of drug abuse and Mama’s Little Helper. I mean, lots of angles into it.

0:31:22
PR: Yeah, and segregation was alive and well. And it’s interesting, especially when you talk about, in my lifetime, having grown up the last 10 years of the Cold War and into the 90s, which were pretty decent. And then 2000s, which of course were sort of kicked off by 9-11 and started a whole new political and social era. But during all that time, it always felt like everyone was like, well, the 50s were perfect, you know? And so in the 80s, everything was like, yeah, 50s were perfect. In the 90s, it’s like your grandparents were just wistfully remembering the 50s, which is crazy because two of my grandparents were of Spanish and Native American descent.

0:32:07
To me, it’s like, wow, you guys really had that good of a time in the 50s? I don’t know if it covers it in that book, but do we really know how we come up with this nostalgia for eras? What are we doing when we look at it that way and we ignore the fact that people were just dying of the plague and things like that.

BR: Yeah, I’ve looked into that some, and also, of course, a lot of that goes to psychology, and why it is that, psychology and sociology, why it is that people will sort of focus in on where we are now and sort of look back on the good old days.

0:32:43
And I think that there’s a couple things that sort of feed into it. One of them is that nostalgia is routinely fed to us as great and good. For example, in advertising. There’s a branch of advertising that focuses just on nostalgia. The Wherther’s Originals.

PR: Pepperidge Farms, remember?

BR: Do you remember? You know, you have a certain… Oh, do you remember the good old days when you and grandpa used to run in the sunny fields and drink lemonade and everything was good and pure and proper?

0:33:25
So part of it is that the advertising media and other media as well, they have a vested interest in drawing on that and having people respond to it, financially, for example. And you also see this, for example, in films, where it’s really interesting. I was seeing a film, I forget which one it was, it was earlier this year, and even though it was aimed at millennials, the soundtrack was from the 80s.

PR: Yeah, I’ve been noticing a lot of that lately.

BR: And I’m like, well, hold on here. Your target audience is probably, they’re not the ones who are dancing to George Michael in 84 because they weren’t born yet.

0:34:15
And yet there’s this nostalgia where it’s symbolic of an era. And it evokes all these sort of things. So you have the whole notion of a soundtrack to your life. For some people, an Elvis Presley song is a cue. It’s an emotional, auditory cue to go to that place. For some people of my generation, you hear a Queen song or an 80s song or some disco and it takes you right there. You don’t need to… It’s just immediate, it’s visceral, it’s there. That plays really well.

0:34:50
It plays from an entertainment point of view. It plays from an advertising point of view. And so I think that’s part of it. Another part is that there’s a certain jealousy. There’s a certain love to complain about how better other people had it. It’s the grass is greener, right? Well, my life sucks and I spend my life doing this and that, but boy, the olden days! Things are so much better then.

PR: Simpler times.

0:35:19
BR: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, what happens is that people tend to sort of, the bad stuff tends to sort of fall by the wayside in our memories. Not that we remember, not that we forget the bad things that happened to us. But in general, you know, if there’s things that sort of were good and bad, you know, 15, 20 years ago, we tend to remember the happier times. And people love to complain. People love to play the victim. People love to feel that they’re being screwed over and by politicians and by opponents and by whatever else.

0:35:52
And so there’s a natural tendency to talk about how bad things are today. Whether that’s true or not is sort of another question. In terms of the crime rate, pollution, racism, war, et cetera. And again, some of that may be factual, some not. But I think there’s a natural tendency to sort of go back to a time when there was this perception that that wasn’t as big an issue as it is today.

PR: Right. I’m kind of in a weird cusp between Generation X and Millennials.

0:36:24
And when I was in high school, they were still referring to us as Generation X, and mostly because I think we were the children of the baby boomers. It was kind of interesting because I look back in my life and I think that my heaviest amount of nostalgia is pointed at the 80s, because that was my childhood. Childhood television, childhood music, 80s music is a real big thing for me. I mean, most of the music I listen to to this day is 80s music.

BR: In fact, I actually probably listen to more 80s music these days than I did in the 80s.

PR: I agree. I am positive that’s the case. So, yeah, I look back on the 80s and there is a very warm kind of fuzzy feeling I get taken right back to, you know, my cousin who introduced me to Tears for Fears, probably in 85 when I was just a little kid.

0:37:20
He’s like, you have to listen to this band. And you know, and I remember that moment. I remember sitting in my bedroom with him, listening to it on our tape deck and, and, and I go back to that moment and then everything around that moment just seems so perfect. It always seems like, oh, everything, I felt warm and fuzzy, everything was safe. And I was with my parents and I was in our old house that I grew up in. But, you know, mid-80s there were a lot of issues in the world, but I was a kid and I was pretty ignorant to most of that. And, you know, that was I think part of the reason the nostalgia kind of, you know, I just didn’t have the frame of reference to take in the problems that were going on in the world. And even though a lot of the pop music was political, there actually were quite a number of artists that were highly political, more so than pop music these days, I would suspect.

0:38:12
I did Hands Across America with my mom, as a matter of fact, and we went and stood along the highway. But I didn’t know what for.

BR: I just find it fascinating because you know again quote what do we as a culture and we as individuals choose to bring forth from the past. And and how’s that selection made it and oftentimes what you find is that is that the good things are brought forward. Not that the bad things aren’t but the I think the good things are emphasized, right? And so if someone is evoking the age of the 80s, or the 60s, or the 50s, or whatever else, it’s usually in a positive sense.

0:38:59
It’s usually because they want to give you a smile on your face. They want to make you think back to when you were a kid, and you were happy and carefree, and all these other things. And so the cues that we see today are typically not negative ones. It’s like, well, do you remember when AIDS was ravaging everything? Wasn’t that a horrible time? Remember when Oprah said that by the year 2000, half the world would be dead from AIDS? Which is actually close to what she said. The Bernard Goetz shooting.

0:39:36
There’s so many bad things, the Chernobyl accident, the Challenger accident. I remember when I was in school during the 80s, again, this was the Cold War. This was the end of the Cold War. And I remember very clearly wondering whether we were going to get killed in a nuclear attack from Russia. I mean, that wasn’t just in the 50s. That occurred in my lifetime.

PR: Yeah, even when I was in elementary school, there was a fallout shelter in our school and there were signs with the little radioactive symbol that said fallout shelter. It literally would direct us to that and early on we had drills that we’d actually go down into that shelter and all the students would be standing there.

0:40:23
It was basically just the basement of the school.

BR: Which frankly wouldn’t…

PR: I doubt it would. Yeah.

BR: Hide under your desk, you’ll be fine.

PR: The school was built, I think, in the early 40s, so I don’t think they were really building it for that purpose. But they had those signs even on city buildings in Santa Fe growing up. I remember the district courthouse had a big radioactive sign next to the front door saying fallout shelter.

0:40:46
BR: So, you know, I think that there’s a sort of magnifying glass effect. We’re so focused on today’s issues that we often ignore the context. It’s the news prism. It focuses on disasters. It focuses on massacres. It focuses on the bad news. And so it’s no wonder that what we see in our daily lives tends to focus on bad news. And what we think about 15, 20, 40 years ago is so more the good news.

PR: Look at the news, and the problem is the news never takes into account statistical odds and what the numbers look like over a long enough timeline, which I wouldn’t necessarily think they have a responsibility to do, but they also have a responsibility not to make it sound like everything’s worse than it was. Violent crime in this country, for instance, is lower than it was in the 60s.

0:41:42
In fact, significantly so. Kidnappings, way down. Murders, way down. But you wouldn’t know that. And there’s a number of reasons that you wouldn’t know that. Some of which is just that news is always very in the moment and doesn’t talk about past news very much. Another reason I think, to me, I kind of picture back to when I was a kid and my parents would have the news on in the evenings. And local news was where we got most of our news and most of it was just that. It was pretty local. I mean, they’d touch in on the main political themes for the week at a national level.

0:42:16
But for the most part, I never remember them reporting on the little things that happened in other states. And a breaking story was never a car chase in LA, you know, and it was always just what was happening around you and then the world news, you’d have Dan Rather hop on the screen and start telling you what happened in the Middle East and in Russia and what’s going on with our relations. The narrative was very different, so I think the way they sell it now, it’s like watching a trailer for a horror movie. It’s like they’re just trying to sell you on how scary everything is.

BR: You know, to your point about how things are in the world today, you’re exactly right. I mean, you look at Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Michael Shermer in his book, The Moral Arc, sort of expands on that.

0:43:02
You know, by almost every measure, humans are better off today than in previous generations. You know, literacy, income, education, lifespan, health, take your pick. I mean, warfare, murder, I mean just across the board the trend is crystal clear and it is towards a better world. It just is and and you wouldn’t you wouldn’t know that from the news, right? You wouldn’t know that from social media where everything sucks, everything’s horrible. But the fact that that that is the overall trend and so you know what I think is going on is that I think the amount of social ills is less, but what’s causing the discontent in some ways is the expectation that things should be better.

0:43:46
The expectation is like, well this is 2017, why do we still have mass shootings? Why is there still racism? Why is there still inequality? Why is there still pollution? Well because there’s always been that. That doesn’t mean it’s okay, it just means that the world has not changed as much as you wish it would have. We all wish that these things would be better. We all wish the world was better. We all wish that these social problems were totally gone. No one disputes that.

0:44:20
I think that a lot of times the dissatisfaction and the frustration is in the gulf between our expectations of how we want things to be, how things should be in 2017, versus how things are in the real world. There’s all sorts of different aspects and avenues to this. One of them is like music.

PR: I actually have a lot to say about that. And I will talk about that right after this.

Celestia Ward: Hey Squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with another skeptical fortune cookie. Let’s see how the cookie crumbles this week. “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”.

0:45:09
Whoa, somebody put a razor in my fortune cookie this week. Not Occam’s razor, no. This quote is known as Hitchens’ razor. The well-known and dearly missed author, critic, and confrontational debater Christopher Hitchens was a fountain of secular wit and wisdom. He was held up as one of the four horsemen of the so-called New Atheism movement, and he authored, co-authored, or edited more than 30 books over his lifetime. But in light of the immense amount he contributed to skeptical and secular thought, I was surprised to learn that he’s not the original author of this statement that bears his name. Hitchens was himself referencing an older Latin phrase, quad gratis assertur gratis negatur, which means what is freely asserted is freely dismissed, a proverb used quite commonly throughout the 19th century.

0:45:57
Author Damien Reinhart traces what he believes is the first use of this phrase to a Johann Jörg Prittius, a German Bible scholar who used the Latin phrase in 1705. In light of this, Reinhardt suggests that it should really be known as Prittius’s razor. Regardless of who owns this razor, it’s a useful one to keep in the front shelf of your intellectual pantry. It puts the burden of proof squarely where it belongs, with the person making the claim. It’s not up to me to disprove your UFO experience, or your ghost encounter, or your quick and efficient trip to the DMV. It’s up to you to provide convincing evidence backing up your supposed miracle. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Now let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

PR: So I end up in a lot of conversations on Facebook about music obviously. It’s the world I live in. But the thing I see a lot and it’s not just music people, but people in general is they’re always complaining about today’s pop music. You know, they’re talking about Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj, which I think now these are people who’ve already had a good decade or more into their career, so I don’t even know what today’s artists are.

0:47:25
BR: Yeah, I made some reference to, it was a couple years ago, I made some reference to who I thought was the latest hip thing. I forgot who it was, but it was, they were like, no, no, no, no, she’s already old. I think it was uh the Hannah Montana.

PR: Oh sure yeah Yeah, Miley Cyrus.

BR: Yeah, Miley I was like I was making some hip reference to like the kids are all listening to Miley like oh Grandpa no no Miley’s retired now.

PR: Yeah, no I It’s hard to keep up, but yeah, I you know you get a lot of people complaining about the state of popular music and you see a lot of memes out there on Facebook comparing lyrics. One that struck me was I believe it was I can’t remember what Queen song it was but it was a pretty good lyric from Queen and a lot of their lyrics were really good. Comparing it to a Nicki Minaj song – the lyric was just, you a hoe, repeated I think a dozen times in the verse.

0:48:30
That’s the whole verse. And then, you know, the Queen song was the Queen song. I want to say it might have been Bohemian Rhapsody. And so it’s very, this very operatic, lyrical style. And you know, and people are kind of saying, you know, see, this is what’s wrong with music nowadays. Like, look at, you know, this band and what they wrote. And you know, look at this and and it is frankly to a person who really tries to be as much of a music buff as he can and listen to everything and I you know even I don’t listen to pop music voluntarily but you know I try to keep somewhat abreast of the trends and it’s frankly pretty offensive to me that you would compare Queen to Nicki Minaj not because of the level of creativity or the level of skill in music that they have, but because you’re comparing apples and oranges.

0:49:22

And because Queen is not the Nicki Minaj of their generation. And, you know, they aren’t comparable to Justin Bieber. They aren’t comparable to NSYNC or New Kids on the Block for that matter. And that I think is a big mistake people make when they talk about how bad music is now. They really overlook a number of issues. The truth is…

BR: Cherry picking. Yeah, they’re cherry picking.

PR: Absolutely.

0:49:49
BR: I mean, they could have picked Repetitious, Nicki Minaj’s song to say Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog. Not a bad song, not much variety in the lyrics.

PR: No, no. And that’s kind of, you know, my issue is that music isn’t really worse. I know there’s going to be people listening to it, friends of mine who are going to say, what do you mean music sucks?

0:50:13
BR: Yeah, what do you mean, man? Come on, everybody knows music sucks these days.

PR: Pop music is not really quantifiably any worse than it’s ever been.

BR: We’re getting letters…

PR: Yeah, well, I’m going to get blown up about this one.

BR: You can take it.

PR: But the mediocrity that people point out is perceived by people who are comparing music they like to music they don’t like. And that’s the problem. Pop music in general, I’ll give you kind of an overview. When you talk about pop music in the recording industry, you’re really talking about pretty much from the 1950s until now.

0:50:53
We had what were called A&R, which is Artists in Repertoire. In the 50s, they were guys who basically were charged with taking songs written by a songwriter and packaging up that song with a few teenagers basically and throwing it out there. Now, that’s largely what happened all the way through the 90s and then 2000s the role of the A&R kind of shifted and it was more of a talent scout. But to look back on it, pretty much any of these these bands in the 50s that were kind of a collection of teenage boys that sang a song that was written by someone else and performed by session musicians most of the time. A lot of them didn’t even play on the recordings. It was manufactured and every decade has had average to decent performers with a strong publicity machine behind them. And so what it is is that pop music in and of itself has to appeal to the broadest audience, which means that the writing has certain hallmarks that it hits.

0:51:47
And the reason why it all sounds the same, again, to go back to the 50s, a lot of it sounds exactly the same. As a matter of fact, a lot of it is exactly the same and is only differentiated by the lyrics. But it’s because it’s very simple changes, very simple beats. There are really simple catchy melodies that usually don’t go past three or four chords in the verses and three or four chords in the same key. The beats are usually either energetic and straightforward or maybe it’s a ballad and so it’s kind of slow and moody. But in the end, this formula has always been the same for pop music. So whether it’s Nicki Minaj or Justin Bieber or Frankie Avalon, it’s been the same and there’s no real quantifiable difference in how the industry builds them up and puts them out there.

0:52:51
And frankly, there’s always been good music under all that. And to this day, as we speak, the week that we are putting this podcast out, there’s dozens of great records coming out. And so the state of music is not, you know, we had Queen in the 70s and now all we have is Nicki Minaj. You know, it’s the, yeah, sure we had Queen in the 70s and we had Donny and Marie and their crap.

BR: Well, and keep in mind, of course, that a lot of these musicians, I mean, they span decades, right?

0:53:26
So you look at David Bowie, Elton John, Rush. So there’s a tendency to sort of pigeonhole these people like, well, they’re only… Bob Dylan. I mean, love them or not, I mean, their music changes. And they do their style. But it’s so the music that you saw from, for example, David Bowie in the 90s was different than the music from him in the 70s. And you can have one favorite era or another, but the fact is it’s still there.

0:54:00
And so exactly as you pointed out, the music has always had that variety, but what gets picked up and popular, as you said, has certain structures. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not, it doesn’t mean that the other music isn’t there. It just means that the stuff that you’re likely to hear on the radio, there’s a reason why you’re likely to hear it on the radio. And because it has certain characteristics, certain beats, certain that are just gonna make it more likely to be a hit.

PR: Yeah, that’s pretty much it. I mean, pop music at its core, when you’re talking about writing a song for the purpose of selling a lot of records, is you’re not aiming it at people who are looking for off-time beats and modal changes.

0:54:48
And you’re not aiming it at the avant-garde jazz crowd, or the death metal crowd. This is the kind of music that when you put it out there, people who don’t really actively go out to listen to music still listen to it and get into it. A lot of people in the music world, and a lot of people who are big music fans kind of are a little blind to the huge portion of the population that is actually fairly ambivalent about music. And they mostly just consume it in, you know, circumstantial ways, like they’re driving somewhere and they’re listening to it, or they’re in a store listening to it over the speakers. And when something does catch them, sure, they get into it and they buy, you know, nowadays the one song off iTunes or whatever, but back then it was, you bought a whole record and they sold millions of them because people who aren’t looking for a Neil Peart drum solo, you know, that’s not what they’re in for.

0:55:49
They’re not looking for that. And then there’s also the idea that we create categories that we like to omit pop artists from where we’re, you know, when we’re talking about someone like Justin Bieber or something, you know, we also forget that Metallica is a huge pop band. I mean, now they don’t write pop music as we define it in kind of the casual sense, but they write popular music and sell millions of records. I think they make something like a million dollars a show and they are easily in the top 1% of the music industry.

0:56:28
But we don’t put them on that shelf. And every era’s had those people too. You’ve got the Foo Fighters or Muse or in the 80s, nearly everything I loved was pop in some way or another. I mean, hair metal was pop music. And so, we also like to omit a lot from what we consider pop because we don’t want to think we’re into pop bands.

BR: Well, it’s how we frame things, right? I mean, if you’re going to create a meme bitching about Justin Bieber, bitching about Nicki Minaj, whatever else, I mean, you can do that.

0:57:07
You can frame it however you want. That’s your blinkered version of the world. That doesn’t reflect the greater reality.

PR: Yeah, and you’re not gonna put them up against, you know, Tiny Tim or I mean, so you’re you’re there are a lot of blinders when it comes to to how you like music and how you portray your view of the state of music, but frankly, I Don’t see any reason to think music is any worse than it ever was and I don’t see any indicators that that that Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj are any worse than the new kids on the block or the Partridge family.

BR: I see the same thing in in film. I mean music is more your specialty. I’m more into filmmaking and and film and I think it’s exactly the same thing. You can pick any number of really crappy films from the 70s or 80s and put them up against something.

0:58:03
And he’s like, well, see, you know, back in the day, they were better or worse. I mean, you can pick whatever you want. Uh, you know, there, there are, yes, there have been changes in filmmaking and there’s, there’s horrible films that are being made today. Uh, and there’s good films that are being made today. And, and, you know, whenever people complain to me about the, about how Hollywood blockbusters suck and about how horrible they are, my question is, why are you watching them? Go see some independent films. Go see some short films.

0:58:36
Go see some documentaries. There’s a lot of stuff out there. And if you don’t like the latest mummy blockbuster with Tom Cruise, then don’t go see it. Go see Wonder Woman. The quality stuff is out there. Instead of zombie-like plunking down your 12 bucks to see something you know you’re not gonna really watch or you’re not really gonna like, how about investing and seeking out… Go to your local independent theater. Go support local live acts. There’s all sorts of stuff that’s out there.

0:59:16
And so I, getting back to the nostalgia, the false nostalgia, like, movies today suck, well then why are you watching them? Go see the ones that don’t suck, they are out there, you can find them.

PR: Yeah, that’s true. And having worked in the film industry as well, seeing it from the inside, you know, the reason Hollywood remakes films and the reason they make these generic blockbuster films is the same reason the recording industry, you know, has ten versions of every song and has one person writing, you know, the majority of the music in the 50s practically and not really but, but you know, it’s the same thing, it’s business and it has always been like that Hollywood in fact if you want to get in I mean well There’s a whole different world we can get into there

BR: We should go show about that

PR: We should the Hollywood back in in the the earlier days Up until really the 50s before people had unions It was pretty nasty and and they they owned people like just about as much as one could own a movie star, a studio did.

1:00:27
And they controlled what they did, they controlled how they lived, and it was pretty brutal. It was actually a very dark time for the art. Now, a lot of great movies came out of that era too, but if you look at some of these films and the reason you see the same person in 10 Paramount films and the same person in 10 Warner Brothers films is because they are under a contract that they cannot get out of. Those great films that they did, a lot of them were criminally underpaid for and suffered. People like Judy Garland, their lives were just essentially ruined by the studio system. Films, again, we sheen over with that gloss of nostalgia where we’re like, oh, everything just used to be so great and they used to do such a good job with things.

1:01:17
It’s like, number one, no. The 60s in particular for some reason had an amazing number of, I think it’s because it became cheaper to make films. So people were just making them left and right. And you had people like Ed Wood and the dawn of the B movie was really in that era. And I mean, there were some horrible movies in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and of course, up to this day, that were just, you know, I mean, we don’t remember because they sucked. And, you know…

BR: And, and, and keep in mind, the other thing to keep in mind is that that everyone associated with those bombs don’t want you to remember them. I mean, success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. And so there is a vested interest in society at large and certainly the stars, producers, actors, studios to bury a dud as soon as possible. Because they only want you to remember the successful ones. And so there’s this sort of whitewashing and again going back to nostalgia.

1:02:20
It’s like, remember all the great films I did? Yeah, I remember the duds too. Let’s not talk about those.

PR: Yeah, that’s how it is. And I think art in general, we could talk about it endlessly. Every format you can think of has always had, especially since the era of an industry around an art. I think that’s really the place it kicked off. Sure, we can look back to classical composers and things like that and talk about how Mozart was mainstream or something but you know mainstream and underground weren’t a thing back then because you only remembered the guys that you know thousands of people saw because they weren’t recording the records, you know your average minstrel in a tavern, you know, no one remembers their name and they don’t exist anymore. So, but you know nowadays it’s a little different since there was an industry around it You know they propped up the stuff that sold the most and and the film industry the music industry and even the fine arts industries, I mean they’ve all been subject to that and I think that that is one of the things that, you know, nostalgia really kind of, people get very strong about and don’t realize how wrong they are.

1:03:34
Things aren’t necessarily objectively better or worse, I mean there’s been crap and great stuff and the dawn of the the format.

BR: And yet, you know again That’s that’s why Trump uses use the phrase, you know, make America great again. That was that was that’s his theme and And what’s interesting is that is that you can go back and you can look at I mean that that that wording either verbatim or very close has been used by Democrats, Republicans I mean, that’s yeah, that’s that’s not unique to Trump. That, you know, make America great again, some permutation of those words and that theme is standard procedure. And it’s everybody across the board, all politicians want to feed on that. They want to, you know, they recognize that voters, if you go up to the average person and you say, are you deliriously happy?

1:04:31
Or even, are you happy? We’re like, well, you know, I don’t make as much money as I could. I could, I mean, everybody has some complaints. You know, very few people are entirely content with their lives. And especially with the continual feed of bad news and the news, yeah, there’s things that need to be changed about the world. So of course people are going to think, of course people are going to go to, well, things could be better. Of course things could be better. Well, funny you should mention that, sir, because you know what?

1:05:00
My candidate can make things better. Oh, all right, here you go. And they’re all going to play on that, and why wouldn’t they? And so there’s nothing new about that. It’s just one more way to tap into that sort of false nostalgia.

PR: So yeah, there are a lot of things that nostalgia makes us feel good about, but there’s a lot of things that we tend to ignore. And I think that taking a skeptical look at your own nostalgia and society’s nostalgia is really important. Even in just getting a little perspective on the things that you like and you think are better.

1:05:39
And maybe it might open you up to being a little more receptive to pop music these days. But bottom line is, overall, it’s important to just be skeptical. And nostalgia is something that you certainly should apply that to.

BR: How about instead of reminiscing about a mythical past that didn’t exist, work on fixing tomorrow. Work on the time you spend wistfully reminiscing about the days that never were could be spent on improving tomorrow.

1:06:12
PR: I think that’s a good takeaway. I mean, instead of saying, make America great again, let’s make it great, period.

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BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support, you can head over to iTunes and give us a review. Every five star review gets us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

1:07:12
PR: And that about does it for this week’s episode. And stay tuned for next week’s episode where we will be circling back to touching on something that we briefly brought up in an episode when we were talking about aliens. But we’re going to be talking about crop circles. Ben, what exactly are we going to be bringing up?

BR: Specifically, the crop circle case that I call the Stonehenge Surprise. And it’s one of my favorite cases in terms of crop circle investigations. I’ve done several, but this is one of my more recent ones and one of the more in-depth ones. I wrote it up for a magazine article, and it’s a fascinating case. Lots of different angles into it and skeptical themes.

1:07:54
We’ll talk about that case. It’ll be a fun one.

PR: Awesome. I really look forward to it. In the meantime, folks, stay strange, and we’ll see you next week.