Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Listener mail.
Speaker 2: My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host, Robert
Speaker 2: Lamb is out today, so I'm going to be recording
Speaker 2: this episode solo, but Rob is going to be back
Speaker 2: with me on Mike for all new episodes very soon.
Speaker 2: We'll get to your messages in just a minute, but
Speaker 2: first I wanted to say if you're a fan of
Speaker 2: the podcast and you've never written in before, now would
Speaker 2: be a great time to do it. You can reach
Speaker 2: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: All types of messages are welcome. We love feedback to
Speaker 2: recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting you would
Speaker 2: like to add to a topic we've talked about. You
Speaker 2: can also write in with corrections if necessary, if you've
Speaker 2: got questions or you're curious about our opinion on something,
Speaker 2: if there's a topic you think would make for a
Speaker 2: good episode, or if you just want to say hello,
Speaker 2: let us know where you listen from, how you found
Speaker 2: out about the show, what you like about the show.
Speaker 2: All of that is fair game. Contact at stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow your Mind dot com. Okay. This first message comes
Speaker 2: from repeat correspondent Renata. This came in after the series
Speaker 2: Rob and I did about the great Red Spot of
Speaker 2: Jupiter and JJ. If you can, let's throw on a
Speaker 2: little bit of Gustav Holst's Jupiter theme from the Planets.
Speaker 2: All right, Renata says, Hello, Joe and Rob. I feel
Speaker 2: like I hit the jackpot with the episodes on Jupiter's
Speaker 2: Red Spot for one thing. As you may have guessed
Speaker 2: from my very first email to you about Holst's Planets
Speaker 2: and free San, I love Jupiter, especially the red spot,
Speaker 2: and you went into cyclones and hot towers and folks.
Speaker 2: If you want to go back and listen to the
Speaker 2: episode that Renata is referring to there, I think it
Speaker 2: was just called Musical Freesan that spelled frissn about that
Speaker 2: feeling when music gives you goosebumps. I did that. I
Speaker 2: believe I did that as an episode with former producer
Speaker 2: Seth Nicholas Johnson. So yeah, you can look that up
Speaker 2: in the archive if you want to give it a lesson. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Renata's message continues, this is a great opportunity to bring
Speaker 2: up Joanne Simpson, the first woman to earn a PhD
Speaker 2: in meteorology in nineteen forty nine. Joanne Simpson was a
Speaker 2: pioneering atmospheric scientist whose work dramatically advanced our understanding of
Speaker 2: tropical meteorology, particularly regarding tropical convection, cloud dynamics, and tropical cyclones.
Speaker 2: She got her pilot's license during World War II and
Speaker 2: flew into scary storms for her early research. Sometimes she
Speaker 2: would even bring her young son. You almost certainly referenced
Speaker 2: her work in your research, as well as that of
Speaker 2: Robert Simpson, her husband. No relation to the Simpsons, though
Speaker 2: I'm sure they did not appreciate the Simpsons getting the
Speaker 2: Coriolis effect wrong. Joanne worked for NASA, and while she
Speaker 2: worked on satellites for studying clouds on Earth, she didn't
Speaker 2: directly study other planets. However, her work on how individual
Speaker 2: thunderstorms self organized into larger weather systems like hurricanes helped
Speaker 2: scientists theorize how giant storms on Jupiter like the Red
Speaker 2: Spot and White Ovals might form and persist. The Tropical
Speaker 2: Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM, satellite, which she worked on,
Speaker 2: advanced the use of spaceborne radar and microwave instruments to
Speaker 2: measure rainfall and vertical cloud structure, helping to design and
Speaker 2: interpret data of Juno and earlier missions to Jupiter and Saturn,
Speaker 2: especially in understanding moist convection and deep atmospheric motions beneath
Speaker 2: the cloud tops. Anyway, I could go on. Also, Joanne
Speaker 2: Simpson was my grandma. She passed away in twenty ten.
Speaker 2: It's fun to hear her work coming into play in
Speaker 2: a Stuff to Blow your Mind episode. Thank you for
Speaker 2: All you do, Reanata. Wow, Well, thank you, Renauda. That
Speaker 2: is a really cool family connection. So after we got
Speaker 2: your email, I went and I read more about Johann
Speaker 2: Simpson's biography, including one piece that was her twenty ten
Speaker 2: memoriam in EOS, the news journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Speaker 2: This was an article by a UVA environmental scientist named
Speaker 2: Michael Garstang, and after reading this, I was thinking about
Speaker 2: Joanne Simpson's work in the context of Jupiter, and one
Speaker 2: interesting parallel is that, as we talked about in the episode,
Speaker 2: Jupiter's weather and atmospheric circulation is driven mostly not by
Speaker 2: solar energy, but by heat that emanates from deep within
Speaker 2: Jupiter itself due to gravitational contraction. The gravitational squeezing of
Speaker 2: the planetary mass, so heat wells up from below, and
Speaker 2: that heat coming up from below provides most of the
Speaker 2: energy that drives Jupiter's weather. Now, Earth is not like that.
Speaker 2: By contrast, Earth's atmosphere gets almost all of its energy
Speaker 2: ultimately from the Sun. But that does not mean you
Speaker 2: should think about the Earth's atmosphere and its weather patterns
Speaker 2: and atmospheric circulation as being driven by heat from above,
Speaker 2: so Garstang writes in this piece about Joanne Simpson. Quote.
Speaker 2: Critical to Joanne's understanding of how the fluid systems of
Speaker 2: the planet worked was her early clarification of how the
Speaker 2: Sun's energy was used. She pointed out that although the
Speaker 2: Sun is the sole source of energy, atmospheric circulation is
Speaker 2: driven not from above, but from below through its coupling
Speaker 2: with the surface of the ocean and the land. This
Speaker 2: led her to not only contribute to the fledgling field
Speaker 2: of air sea interaction, but also to make notable contributions
Speaker 2: to the concepts of heat islands, land, sea breezes, and
Speaker 2: other surface atmosphere connections. So, in other words, Joan Simpson
Speaker 2: focused on the ways that weather patterns and atmospheric circulation
Speaker 2: are driven from below by radiation, convection, and also by
Speaker 2: evaporation because evaporated moisture from the ocean and from the land,
Speaker 2: that moisture in the air is sometimes referred to in
Speaker 2: atmospheric sciences as latent heat. That's still a type of
Speaker 2: energy that water vapor can then condense and fall back
Speaker 2: down as rain, so that contributes to the energy of
Speaker 2: storms as well. But these things, the radiation, the convection,
Speaker 2: and the evaporation from the land masses and the sea
Speaker 2: water that were originally heated by the sun, those are
Speaker 2: the things that really drive atmospheric circulation and weather in storms.
Speaker 2: So in a way, though the original source of the
Speaker 2: energy is different, Earth and Jupiter both have this weather
Speaker 2: from below principle in common. There are also a lot
Speaker 2: of great stories about Joan Simpson's preference for actual sensing
Speaker 2: of data about clouds from directly in the sky, like
Speaker 2: using airplanes equipped with sensors to gather data about clouds
Speaker 2: from up in the air and being on those flights herself,
Speaker 2: as Renata was talking about. So again, thank you for
Speaker 2: not a very very cool connection. Your grandma was a
Speaker 2: cool lady. Okay. Next, I think I'm going to jump
Speaker 2: into a couple of responses to our series on p Male.
Speaker 2: This was a collection of episodes that Rob and I
Speaker 2: did about animal communication based on the medium of urine.
Speaker 2: Of course, humans have language in its many forms, but
Speaker 2: lots of other animals, from dogs to dolphins to lobsters,
Speaker 2: apparently share vital, sometimes complex information through their pee. And
Speaker 2: one of the things we talked about in these episodes
Speaker 2: was the role of old faction, the sense of smell,
Speaker 2: which is the main sense that a lot of land
Speaker 2: animals like dogs used to read the p male of others.
Speaker 2: And it's amazingly weird to imagine living in the smell world,
Speaker 2: of a dog being so much more sensitive than us
Speaker 2: to olfactory information, being able to read so much of
Speaker 2: social and even probably emotional relevance from these volatile chemical signals. So,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like we talked about imagining a
Speaker 2: physical environment all marked up with little bits of smell
Speaker 2: based poetry, and from this Rob made a comparison to
Speaker 2: a character from a Terry Pratchett novel who is a
Speaker 2: werewolf detective with extreme olfactory sensitivity from her wolf side,
Speaker 2: so she could kind of see into the past like
Speaker 2: who was in what room, where, even where they stood
Speaker 2: and so forth because of smells. Anyway, onto this message
Speaker 2: from Skuyler, subject line Pemil the Nose. Nose. Hey, there's
Speaker 2: a cool TV show, The Sniffer. It's a Russo, Ukraine
Speaker 2: and cop show about a consultant with a superhuman sense
Speaker 2: of smell that he uses to solve the most impossible
Speaker 2: of cases. It's quite good. I watched it on Netflix
Speaker 2: a decade or so ago, though I don't know if
Speaker 2: it's still there. Great stuff as usual, Skyler. Well, thank you, Skyler.
Speaker 2: I've never seen this show. It seems to share an
Speaker 2: angle with that example where ib was talking about, because
Speaker 2: the idea of is like a super smeller as a detective.
Speaker 2: And this got me thinking about other characters with super
Speaker 2: senses of smell. Obviously, you've got like comic book heroes
Speaker 2: like Wolverine from The X Men. I think maybe saber
Speaker 2: Tooth as super smell as well, and in that vein
Speaker 2: for rather obvious reasons. Characters with super smell a lot
Speaker 2: of times have animal connections. Maybe they're part animal, or
Speaker 2: they transform into an animal, or they've been you know,
Speaker 2: injected with super animal serum like they're part wolf or something.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a pretty clear connection. Why that would
Speaker 2: be because we know a lot of animals have more
Speaker 2: powerful and more socially relevant senses of smell than us,
Speaker 2: So that kind of, you know, grafts on to a
Speaker 2: humanoid to a humanoid hero who gets their powers. Of course,
Speaker 2: a lot of characters like the one you're bringing up
Speaker 2: from this detective show and the one Rob was talking about,
Speaker 2: tend to use super smell powers as a kind of
Speaker 2: investigation aid, like sensing the past or sensing things that
Speaker 2: are invisible. I was trying to think about other characters.
Speaker 2: It's been a long time, long time since I've read it,
Speaker 2: but I remember the narrator of Midnight's Children by Salmon
Speaker 2: Rushdi had a large nose that was like always getting
Speaker 2: infected or congested or something. And then he has a
Speaker 2: medical operation and after this it turns out he can
Speaker 2: like smell lies and smell the future and stuff. But anyway,
Speaker 2: I started thinking about how in fiction, heightened physical senses
Speaker 2: are often not just a literal physical senses, but they're
Speaker 2: also metaphors for special emotional or cognitive sensibilities or sensitivities.
Speaker 2: Like I was thinking about characters who are described as
Speaker 2: having sharp physical eyesight. I think that's a lot of
Speaker 2: times a metaphor for mental powers of observation and anticipation,
Speaker 2: like you see things at a distance and thus see
Speaker 2: them coming earlier. And it tends to be a physical
Speaker 2: metaphor for cognitive attention to detail. So there's like an
Speaker 2: association between visual acuity and the psychological trait of conscientiousness.
Speaker 2: Powerful hearing, I think a lot of times is a
Speaker 2: metaphor for the cognitive trait of discernment, like the ability
Speaker 2: to judge and decide well, and the ability to isolate
Speaker 2: relevant information and ignore what's irrelevant. I guess literally the
Speaker 2: mental power to separate signal from noise, an information term
Speaker 2: borrowed from auditory senses. So supersite and superhering I think
Speaker 2: are the most common super sin is in fictional storytelling,
Speaker 2: but super smell does pop up sometimes. One trend I
Speaker 2: think is that heightened smell is often treated as a
Speaker 2: bit more mysterious than supersiited or superhering. It is associated
Speaker 2: with spooky cognitive traits like intuition. You get a feeling
Speaker 2: about something or someone, but you couldn't say exactly why,
Speaker 2: and in fact, now that I think about it, smell
Speaker 2: as a physical metaphor for intuition is already there in
Speaker 2: common expressions in English, at least, like somebody saying of
Speaker 2: a situation, this doesn't smell right, or calling something fishy.
Speaker 2: You know that manifests in my imagination at least as
Speaker 2: a fishy smell. And this is what we say when
Speaker 2: we have a feeling that something is not to be trusted.
Speaker 2: But it's difficult to spell out exactly why, Like you
Speaker 2: can't consciously connect to the dots, but something just feels
Speaker 2: off and I don't know. Yeah, for some reason, we
Speaker 2: associate that with smell that may be connected to real
Speaker 2: physical and maybe neurological things about the sense of smell
Speaker 2: that you know, smell is it's less connected to our
Speaker 2: conscious decision making, but it still connects to our emotions,
Speaker 2: like smells are quite powerful in creating motivation states. For
Speaker 2: a smell can very easily create an overwhelming attraction like
Speaker 2: to food, or it can create repellent disgust. You know,
Speaker 2: there's hardly anything that drives you away from something faster
Speaker 2: than like a rotten smell, And yet it's harder to
Speaker 2: identify the point of origin for a smell than it
Speaker 2: is for an image in the mind or a sound. Also,
Speaker 2: it's common in nature for a smell to exist and
Speaker 2: be highly motivating even though you don't know exactly what's
Speaker 2: causing it, Like a putrid smell can repel you, even
Speaker 2: if you couldn't say what it was. Not sure what
Speaker 2: all this adds up to, but I don't know. I
Speaker 2: guess I think it's interesting that we have this tendency
Speaker 2: to use super superpowers, including super senses, as ways of illustrating.
Speaker 2: They're kind of a shortcut to character development in a way.
Speaker 2: They serve as these metaphors for cognitive traits that you
Speaker 2: want to illustrate or psychological tendencies. So I wonder if
Speaker 2: this applies to this detective the Russo Ukrainian Detective show
Speaker 2: that I've never seen before, Like, does this detective character
Speaker 2: also tend to have a greater sense of intuition about
Speaker 2: things or something else that we tend to associate with
Speaker 2: with sensing the invisible? Okay, this next message is from Kenna,
Speaker 2: and it's also about femail. This message is referring to
Speaker 2: how in those episodes we talked about a study of
Speaker 2: urine scent marking behavior in dogs, which found that the
Speaker 2: smaller a dog is typically the wider the angle of
Speaker 2: its legs when it does raise leg you'rein scent marking
Speaker 2: and there could be a number of reasons to explain that,
Speaker 2: But one of the possible explanations was that smaller dogs
Speaker 2: were working harder to quote lie about their size in
Speaker 2: your incent marking, hoping to pee up higher on the
Speaker 2: object that they're marking in order to seem like they're
Speaker 2: a bigger dog than they are. Again, that interpretation's not
Speaker 2: for sure, but if that is in fact the reason,
Speaker 2: that's rather amusing imagining these little dogs trying to pretend
Speaker 2: to be big. Kenna says Hi, Robert and Joe. I
Speaker 2: was listening to your episode on Pea Communication and was
Speaker 2: surprised that the veterinarian you cited for reasons small dogs
Speaker 2: might lift their legs at a higher angle than large
Speaker 2: dogs didn't mention what I thought was obvious. In general,
Speaker 2: the larger and heavier the dog, the more likely they
Speaker 2: are to have hip or knee injuries. Our vet from
Speaker 2: My Childhood Dogs said that this was especially true for
Speaker 2: some pure breeds, such as retrievers. But I'm not sure
Speaker 2: how much of that is sampling bias. Since labs and
Speaker 2: goldens are such popular breeds, you will get a lot
Speaker 2: more labs in lab mixes in practice than say, purebred spaniels.
Speaker 2: Love the show, keep peeing scientific information directly into our faces, Kenna. Okay.
Speaker 2: This next message is also from Kenna, responding to our
Speaker 2: last listener mail episode, and in that episode, a listener
Speaker 2: named Jeff wrote in about an old nature book series
Speaker 2: from the sixties and seventies called Animals Do the Strangest Things.
Speaker 2: I think there was also one called Fish Do the
Speaker 2: Strangest Things. Oh yeah, that was it, because they had
Speaker 2: the archerfish and the anglerfish. And among the many funny
Speaker 2: things about these books were that they would frequently refer
Speaker 2: to mating pairs of animals as husband and wife. And
Speaker 2: also they had these passages with a sad clipped prosdy
Speaker 2: and word choice, so they ended up sounding like confessional poetry.
Speaker 2: I remember there was a there was some passage in
Speaker 2: the Fish book that was talking about anglerfish and it
Speaker 2: was like the husband anglerfish is now fused to his
Speaker 2: bride's body. He doesn't have to go fishing anymore. Now
Speaker 2: he will never lose his wife in the dark anyway.
Speaker 2: Following up on that, Kenna says, Hi, Robin Joe in
Speaker 2: response to your listener mail, I too had a copy
Speaker 2: of Fish Do the Strangest Things and Birds Do the
Speaker 2: Strangest Things, and my brother and I used to try
Speaker 2: to copy the drawings mentioned in Fish was Granddad the
Speaker 2: lungfish who lived at the Shed Aquarium in Chicago. We
Speaker 2: begged to go meet him. The tickets were expensive, but
Speaker 2: eventually our parents relented on the condition that we were
Speaker 2: actually going to spend the whole day at the aquarium
Speaker 2: and not begged to go see the Field Museum, our
Speaker 2: favorite part of Chicago. Halfway through we did keep our promise,
Speaker 2: but our parents were not impressed by how long we
Speaker 2: spent with our faces smashed against the glass, waiting for
Speaker 2: a large mudcolored fish fish tube to wake up and move. Sadly,
Speaker 2: Granddad is long gone, but I have passed the series
Speaker 2: on by way of a link to a secondhand book
Speaker 2: website to multiple friends' children, some of whom now quote
Speaker 2: the passages about bower birds building houses for their wives.
Speaker 2: I guess someone is going to have to explain bigamy
Speaker 2: to them when they learned about herd animals. But that
Speaker 2: is not my problem. Kenna. Well, thank you so much, Kenna.
Speaker 2: And as a special treat I went looking for it
Speaker 2: and I managed to find at least part of the
Speaker 2: bower bird section from Birds Do the Strangest Things on
Speaker 2: the Internet. So this book, by the way, I believe
Speaker 2: the whole series, but at least this book is by
Speaker 2: Leonora and Arthur Hornblow, and it's got a section on
Speaker 2: the bower birds called the Builder. I'm going to read
Speaker 2: one of the passages here. Quote. One kind of bower
Speaker 2: bird makes a garden of moss around a tree. Then
Speaker 2: he builds a house of twigs. Sometimes he builds it
Speaker 2: six feet tall. He wants his house and garden to
Speaker 2: be pretty. He puts leaves and moss and ferns all around.
Speaker 2: He makes little piles of berries, stones, shells, and flowers.
Speaker 2: When the flowers die, he throws them out and brings
Speaker 2: fresh ones. Bower birds are always looking for pretty things.
Speaker 2: They will even steal them from another bird's bower. Okay.
Speaker 2: This next message is following up from a listener mail
Speaker 2: discussion after our series on cynicism. We were talking about
Speaker 2: whether the ever present threat of digital scams is making
Speaker 2: us more cynical. Unfortunately, I think the answer is probably yes.
Speaker 2: I can explain more about that after the message, But
Speaker 2: this email is from Ian Ian writes subject line digital Scammers,
Speaker 2: Dear Robin Joe. I wanted to respond to another listener
Speaker 2: mail about scams surrounding home purchases and protective measures banks
Speaker 2: advise people to take, such as never clicking links, etc.
Speaker 2: Regarding phone scams specifically, I have read, though cannot vouch
Speaker 2: for myself, that the scammers deliberately do things that should
Speaker 2: be read flags early in the call in an attempt
Speaker 2: to filter out people who are on alert for scams
Speaker 2: and not waste their time with them. That way, only
Speaker 2: people who are more likely to go through the whole
Speaker 2: process make it beyond the first few seconds of the call,
Speaker 2: and the scammers can better focus their efforts. Yeah, Yan,
Speaker 2: I've read about this, but it was in the context
Speaker 2: of email. I think this was an explanation for why
Speaker 2: a lot of these initial scam emails seems like more
Speaker 2: grammar and spelling mistakes and weird formatting and things like
Speaker 2: that than you would expect. The explanation given is that
Speaker 2: this actually does help the scammer, because yeah, it helps
Speaker 2: narrow things down. You can imagine that the biggest bottleneck
Speaker 2: on money flowing into the scam operation is actually the
Speaker 2: human scam operator's time, so they don't waste time going
Speaker 2: through the early steps in the scam with victims who
Speaker 2: are less likely to hand over the money in the end. Anyway,
Speaker 2: back to Ian's email, Having said that, I may be
Speaker 2: telling them myself by admitting that I was recently almost
Speaker 2: caught by a Smischer Smischer for SMS text message scamming.
Speaker 2: I received a text message purporting to be from easy
Speaker 2: Pass that my out of state toll road bill was
Speaker 2: due by coincidence. I had in fact driven on an
Speaker 2: out of state toll road a couple of months before,
Speaker 2: but never received a bill, so I had in the
Speaker 2: back of my mind that I should be receiving one
Speaker 2: at some point. When I saw the text, which in
Speaker 2: retrospect should have raised red flags, my first thought was oh,
Speaker 2: fie finally, and I clicked the link. It was a
Speaker 2: standard short link format and didn't appear suspicious. It took
Speaker 2: me to a website that appeared legitimate at first Blush,
Speaker 2: and I made it past the point of entering my
Speaker 2: address and phone number and it was only on the
Speaker 2: page to enter my payment information that I noticed it
Speaker 2: was for the wrong state that set off warning bells.
Speaker 2: And then in looking closer, I noticed that the URL
Speaker 2: for the page was a gibberish url and not something
Speaker 2: legitimate like company dot com or state dot gov. At
Speaker 2: that point I closed the page thankfully before entering my
Speaker 2: credit card. But it was a close thing. I'm an
Speaker 2: attorney and consider myself well educated, reasonably intelligent, and appropriately skeptical.
Speaker 2: But because the text happened to catch me at the
Speaker 2: right time and happened to be something I'd been expecting,
Speaker 2: I almost fell for it. That's something that could happen
Speaker 2: to anyone. Thanks for a great show, Ian. Ps I
Speaker 2: have never been billed for my real toll room usage. Well,
Speaker 2: thank you, Ian. This is weird because literally within about
Speaker 2: twenty four hours of this email coming in, I also
Speaker 2: personally got an easy Pass branded toll road scam text
Speaker 2: and I'd never seen one of those before. So, Ian,
Speaker 2: I wonder if you and I were both part of
Speaker 2: some kind of rolling mass text wave. But anyway, I
Speaker 2: really appreciate you writing in about this because I think
Speaker 2: this example illustrates several things about these scams that are
Speaker 2: really important to remember. You do not have to be
Speaker 2: dumb or gullible to fall for one of these scams.
Speaker 2: Just like Ian says, the fact that you're capable, at
Speaker 2: least in some situations of skeptical thinking does not make
Speaker 2: you immune. And the reason for this is that nobody
Speaker 2: actually operates in skeptic mode all the time. That would
Speaker 2: be impractical, obnoxious, and absurd. You can't go through all
Speaker 2: of life and all situations looking for hard evidence and
Speaker 2: evidential verification. If I'm the grocery store and I'm about
Speaker 2: to get a bunch of bananas and my wife tells
Speaker 2: me we already have bananas at home, I just blindly
Speaker 2: believe her. I don't need to go back home and
Speaker 2: do a fruit check to verify she's probably right. The
Speaker 2: cost of being wrong about this is trivial. There's just
Speaker 2: no reason to put my guard up and go into
Speaker 2: evidence testing mode. And no matter how practiced of a
Speaker 2: skeptic you are, even if you're Carl Sagan or James Randy,
Speaker 2: you have to operate in banana faith mode for most
Speaker 2: situations in life. In fact, I think one of the
Speaker 2: core skills necessary for being a skeptic effectively is having
Speaker 2: a good sense for when to turn off your automatic
Speaker 2: trust and go into critical evidence seeking mode. In fact,
Speaker 2: some of the studies we looked at in the Cynicism
Speaker 2: episodes talked about this. I think the researchers called it
Speaker 2: discriminate ability. That's the ability to tell the difference between
Speaker 2: situations where you should just trust and situations where you
Speaker 2: should not trust. But nobody is going to have a
Speaker 2: perfect record at this Scammers often get around your skeptical
Speaker 2: impulses by crafting their pitch in a way that is
Speaker 2: designed to bypass skeptical review. So the scam doesn't exactly
Speaker 2: defeat your evidence testing powers, it manages to slip by
Speaker 2: without you ever using them, sometimes by disguising itself as
Speaker 2: a plausible, mundane, familiar type of transaction. I think Ian's
Speaker 2: email is a good example here. So pay for usage
Speaker 2: of a road of a toll road, complete this form
Speaker 2: to receive your parcel. I've bet a lot of people
Speaker 2: out there have gotten this one. You get a text
Speaker 2: message it's like, hey, you're waiting on a package, but
Speaker 2: it can't be delivered. Come in or your address. And
Speaker 2: it turns out this is a scam that's going to
Speaker 2: lead you to a form to fill in a bunch
Speaker 2: of information. There's like, oh, check out this email attachment,
Speaker 2: just kind of a strange email. Please open the spreadsheet. Oh,
Speaker 2: you know, update your password, et cetera. These are all
Speaker 2: normal types of or at least seemingly normal types of
Speaker 2: communications from institutions and service providers. Nothing about them unless
Speaker 2: you're on the lookout for scams of this sort would
Speaker 2: really set off a red flag. They also take advantage
Speaker 2: of scale, like the scale of the number of different
Speaker 2: victims they can reach out to to leverage coincidences. This
Speaker 2: comes back to Ian's example with the toll road. So
Speaker 2: you know, maybe the toll road scammer has some way
Speaker 2: of associating your phone number or your email address with
Speaker 2: usage data for toll roads. But I doubt that. If
Speaker 2: I had to guess, I'd say Ian probably just got
Speaker 2: hit with a coincidence, the fact that he had used
Speaker 2: a toll road was expecting maybe to get a bill
Speaker 2: and then actually got one. And this actually wouldn't be
Speaker 2: very uncommon because lots of people use toll roads. The
Speaker 2: scammers are spamming lots of phone numbers, and the same
Speaker 2: thing with text messages about like a parcel delivery. At
Speaker 2: any given time, a pretty large percentage of people are
Speaker 2: going to be waiting on some kind of package. In
Speaker 2: other cases, the scam tries to bypass your skepticism, not
Speaker 2: by appearing to be something kind of innocuous and mundane,
Speaker 2: but by creating a heightened state of emotion and motivation
Speaker 2: that clouds your judgment. Sometimes they do this by taking
Speaker 2: advantage of our desire for something like money or romantic relationships.
Speaker 2: You know, there are a lot of get rich quick
Speaker 2: scheme scams or romance scams, or they work by creating
Speaker 2: a state of fear, like this message is from the IRS.
Speaker 2: You owe back taxes and if you don't pay within
Speaker 2: twenty four hours, we will issue an arrest warrant and
Speaker 2: you'll be subject to up to ten years in prison.
Speaker 2: They're trying to create a sense of fear and urgency
Speaker 2: to keep you from slowing down and thinking clearly about
Speaker 2: what's going on. So anyway, the point in the end being,
Speaker 2: these tactics really do work, and they don't just work
Speaker 2: on dumb people or people who don't have the ability
Speaker 2: to think skeptically. They work on people who are capable
Speaker 2: of thinking clearly and skeptically in other situations by getting
Speaker 2: you to not think that way in this situation. And
Speaker 2: this brings me back to what I originally said when
Speaker 2: we talked about this in the episodes. The thing that
Speaker 2: I was saying was that I think digital scams are
Speaker 2: a much bigger problem than just what happens when the
Speaker 2: scam is successful, then just the resources lost when somebody
Speaker 2: actually does, you know, make the payment, and those numbers
Speaker 2: are huge, by the way. I think probably most people
Speaker 2: listening know at least one person, maybe an older relative
Speaker 2: or maybe not somebody else in their life, who has
Speaker 2: lost a ton of money to a digital scam like this.
Speaker 2: But the even more insidious effect of these scams is
Speaker 2: that I think they have toxic general effects on culture
Speaker 2: because again, most people, most of the time are pretty trustworthy.
Speaker 2: This is actually this was confirmed by experiments that we
Speaker 2: talked about in the Cynicism series. We tend to overestimate
Speaker 2: the selfishness and the untrustworthiness of strangers. Most people, most
Speaker 2: of the time you can trust, but especially in the
Speaker 2: modern technology age, a relatively small number of people, with
Speaker 2: the aid of digital technology, are able to initiate attempts
Speaker 2: attempts to scam an asymmetrically huge number of victims, and
Speaker 2: even though most of those attempts fail, each contact point
Speaker 2: between the scammer and the potential victim undermines general social trust.
Speaker 2: The fact that you are getting, you know, scam texts
Speaker 2: and scam emails and stuff is just creating this feeling
Speaker 2: in you that you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 2: lies out there. There's a lot of you gotta have
Speaker 2: your guard up, which is bad because it makes us
Speaker 2: feel less like we are safe to operate in banana
Speaker 2: faith mode, even though we really are for the most part. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so these things are insidious. Okay, This next message is
Speaker 2: from Dave. This is about Weird House Cinema. Dave says, Howdye,
Speaker 2: Joe and Rob. I'm a pretty new listener. First discovered
Speaker 2: your podcast on your Zoo Warriors from the Magic Mountain
Speaker 2: episode last year. That was one of my favorites, and
Speaker 2: Dave says, and have been subscribed ever since. I don't
Speaker 2: recall how I came across it. I hadn't heard of
Speaker 2: Zoo Warriors before that, but I had a feeling to
Speaker 2: dive in, and I'm so glad I did. I've always
Speaker 2: enjoyed movies and cinema, even worked in a theater during
Speaker 2: high school. But growing up in the nineties and working
Speaker 2: at a theater, I really only paid attention to movies
Speaker 2: as they came out, So your podcast helped open my
Speaker 2: eyes to some of the gyms, polished and unpolished, from
Speaker 2: before that time. One of the other reasons I'm writing
Speaker 2: is I'm sure you're already aware, but I recently saw
Speaker 2: that Mondo Vision is releasing a four K of on
Speaker 2: the Silver Globe later this month and figured you'd be interested.
Speaker 2: It looks pretty dynamite, features some docs I guess documentaries,
Speaker 2: and a commentary from Zuovski, the director Andrew Zuovski from
Speaker 2: twenty twelve. I really enjoy your show, standard and Weird
Speaker 2: House episodes, and please keep up the good work. Thank
Speaker 2: you both for the countless hours of sharing knowledge and entertainment.
Speaker 2: Best Dave from Wasson. Well, thank you, Dave. Actually I
Speaker 2: was not aware of this. I am looking it up
Speaker 2: right now. Ooh yeah, this does look like a beautiful set. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I was not aware of this. I also don't
Speaker 2: really know anything about Mondo Vision, but they have a
Speaker 2: great website. It looks like I feel like I'm in
Speaker 2: the year two thousand and two. But yeah, the set
Speaker 2: looks great with the nice cover art. Looking forward to that. Okay,
Speaker 2: on to the next Weird House Cinema message. This is
Speaker 2: from Pat, Pat says Rob Joe. As ever, thanks for
Speaker 2: the great shows. Today I write about the two part
Speaker 2: Weird House wicker Man episodes. Again, you chose to speak
Speaker 2: of a unique film. I appreciate your comments and lively
Speaker 2: fan talk. I would like to expand some of the
Speaker 2: thoughts expressed. This film is an expression of art. The
Speaker 2: producer and director present an idea to spark debate and analysis.
Speaker 2: You hesitate to call the film horror and point out
Speaker 2: that it is mostly mystery. You might be interested to
Speaker 2: know that the makers have presented a novelization which expands
Speaker 2: the story. Particularly covered is the question of how Sergeant
Speaker 2: Howie was chosen by the people of summer Isle. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: this was one of our questions, Pat says. Not part
Speaker 2: of the film was a subplot that had Howie's superior
Speaker 2: in contact with Lord Summerle Oh no, set up by
Speaker 2: his boss. That's rough. Pat says, on seeing the film
Speaker 2: as horror, what defines this genre? Is it common tropes
Speaker 2: from a great many movies or something deeper. There are
Speaker 2: plenty of reasons to feel horror throughout the film. Howie
Speaker 2: is horrified by the blatant paganism he encounters. He sees
Speaker 2: deadly sins constantly. He is a devout Christian witnessing damnation.
Speaker 2: The residents of the island see a high handed imperialist
Speaker 2: threatening their way of life. Meaning in this film can
Speaker 2: be found in this duality presented is an argument pitting
Speaker 2: an establishment against an outlying school of thought. The filmmakers
Speaker 2: assume that the viewers are aware of the power of
Speaker 2: the establishment and the dire consequences of Howie's report. Howie
Speaker 2: represents an established culture well known for stamping out the other.
Speaker 2: The ending makes sense to me in that it is
Speaker 2: keeping it is in keeping with pagan beliefs, and represents
Speaker 2: a victory over encroachment, while simultaneously allowing a counter thought
Speaker 2: on Christian reverence. The viewer must judge. I found myself
Speaker 2: thinking about Joseph Campbell and his Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake.
Speaker 2: Campbell shows that the scholar Joyce, meaning James Joyce, the
Speaker 2: author of the novel Finnegan's Wake. Joyce challenges his reader
Speaker 2: to look deeply at his content, to see the symbolism
Speaker 2: in every reference. So too, can one look at Wickerman.
Speaker 2: This film is redolent with symbolism. Rich is it with
Speaker 2: images and dialogue that invite for thought? Why this seems
Speaker 2: like it was written in Lord summerle voice? Rich is
Speaker 2: it with images? The organic nature of the island, which
Speaker 2: can be seen as a celebration of animism. The blatant
Speaker 2: sexual worship of the islanders, which can be seen as
Speaker 2: holy rites. The endless references to reproduction, which can be
Speaker 2: seen as obligations. The use of song to express ancient
Speaker 2: pagan beliefs, which could be seen as a reference to
Speaker 2: oral tradition and a connection to the deep past. I
Speaker 2: found myself counting the references to seamen, pollination, phallic worship, orgies,
Speaker 2: sea foam, the foam from the ale, offering to the sea,
Speaker 2: and more. The importance of Howie's virginity cannot be overstressed.
Speaker 2: His seed must be potent to appease the gods. His
Speaker 2: struggle to maintain his virginity against temptation proves his worthiness.
Speaker 2: There is also the element of mystery. What is the
Speaker 2: nature of the beliefs of the people of Summer Isle.
Speaker 2: I am surprised you did not suggest a connection to
Speaker 2: the theories of Julian James. How do these modern people
Speaker 2: connect to ancient beliefs oral tradition. The filmmakers, in my opinion,
Speaker 2: assume that the viewers have some knowledge of paganism connections
Speaker 2: of the ancient calendar. This film is set at Beltane
Speaker 2: on Walpurgas Eve at a Hinge. I find it compelling
Speaker 2: to think that the population of the island are experiencing
Speaker 2: a direct relationship to their past. The filmmakers present us
Speaker 2: with this mystery. How is this connection made? Thanks again,
Speaker 2: Pat Well, Thanks Pat, This is a great question at
Speaker 2: the end. We talked about this a little bit in
Speaker 2: the episode, but there is something I've always wondered about
Speaker 2: the Wickerman. In the scene where Christopher Lee is explaining
Speaker 2: to how how his grandfather converted the island from Christianity
Speaker 2: to the Summerle form of Celtic Paganism, he makes it
Speaker 2: sound like there was no force or even effort required
Speaker 2: for this mass conversion. I think his exact words are,
Speaker 2: he gave them back their joyous old gods. Implying that
Speaker 2: the people were just waiting to receive them Nuada and
Speaker 2: all the rest, like, Ah, finally we can just be
Speaker 2: pagans again. Like I said in the episode, I do
Speaker 2: not buy the interpretation that the movie is just saying
Speaker 2: Paganism good, Christianity bad. I don't know how you can
Speaker 2: see the ending and really think that is the point
Speaker 2: of the film. But I do think it's suggesting that
Speaker 2: paganism somehow comes more naturally to us, that Christianity is
Speaker 2: something that can only be maintained with great effort and suffering,
Speaker 2: that it is a perhaps noble burden, and whenever it
Speaker 2: breaks under strain or when it breaks us, Nuada and
Speaker 2: the rest of the gods are just there waiting. They're
Speaker 2: kind of a rest state that we return to automatically
Speaker 2: and pat this comes to your question about the can
Speaker 2: in the movie of the Islanders to the ancient beliefs.
Speaker 2: It doesn't make literal sense that upon abandoning whatever your
Speaker 2: current religion is, you would just return automatically to the
Speaker 2: full semantic content of your ancestors beliefs from thousands of
Speaker 2: years ago, Like how would you know the names of
Speaker 2: the gods and what they represented? All that would have
Speaker 2: to be taught in some way. But I think it
Speaker 2: is more plausible, not necessarily that I think this is true,
Speaker 2: but it's at least plausible in principle that some types
Speaker 2: of religions are just more comfortably tailored to biological facts
Speaker 2: about the human brain and the way we relate to
Speaker 2: the planet we live on. So it could be that
Speaker 2: religions based more on nature and fertility represents something more
Speaker 2: like a rest state for us, easy to return to
Speaker 2: when a vact forms in the absence of another religion.
Speaker 2: And I think again that would be plausibly because these
Speaker 2: types of beliefs are more tied to inescapable facts about
Speaker 2: like our bodies and our physical surroundings, about us as animals,
Speaker 2: and about our environment. But at the same time, there's
Speaker 2: this good question in the movie of like, how exactly
Speaker 2: do the specific beliefs of summer Isle's lost paganism, like
Speaker 2: the names of the gods and their domains and so forth,
Speaker 2: how do those beliefs make their way to the modern islanders.
Speaker 2: That's a really good question, And Pat, I think you're
Speaker 2: right to flag the idea of songs here that could
Speaker 2: be a kind of narrative explanation for why folk music
Speaker 2: is so prominent in the movie. Songs transmit messages from
Speaker 2: the past, even when the singer is not attempting to
Speaker 2: do so, and song lyrics are kind of interesting in
Speaker 2: this way as like a as a meme type, because
Speaker 2: song lyrics can become free writing or even parasitic information
Speaker 2: information content that get repeated and spread regardless of their
Speaker 2: value to the singer. Think about how often you sing
Speaker 2: a song without necessarily believing what the lyrics of the
Speaker 2: song are saying. The lyrics are just part of the
Speaker 2: musical content of the song, but they're also words, so
Speaker 2: they do carry a message if you think about them,
Speaker 2: but you know they're attached to this tune you like,
Speaker 2: and you definitely discover this weird free writing information content
Speaker 2: when you like, Like if you have a child and
Speaker 2: you find yourself singing English nursery rhymes to them, you're
Speaker 2: suddenly thinking, what is Humpty Dumpty about? Why is three
Speaker 2: blind mice so horribly violent? And so yeah, there's just
Speaker 2: this like information content stashed in song lyrics that you
Speaker 2: often don't think about because the song in your the
Speaker 2: song when you think about it standing back from it
Speaker 2: is just music, but it does have words, and you
Speaker 2: could imagine, based on what we see in the movie
Speaker 2: that the drinking songs, the pub songs of the Summer Islanders,
Speaker 2: may have contained a lot of information about the pagan
Speaker 2: pantheon long after the island had historically been converted to Christianity,
Speaker 2: and maybe those same songs persisted across the hundreds of
Speaker 2: years and helped with the transition back to what Christopher
Speaker 2: Lee calls the joyous old Gods. So anyway, I guess
Speaker 2: that's my riff pat on your suggestion about the role
Speaker 2: of oral tradition in the islanders connection to their past. Okay,
Speaker 2: I think I'm going to have to wrap this episode
Speaker 2: up here, but hey, if you would like to get
Speaker 2: in touch and perhaps have your message featured on a
Speaker 2: listener Mail episode in the future, as I said at
Speaker 2: the beginning, you can always write us at contact at
Speaker 2: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. We love all
Speaker 2: the different kinds of messages we get. We don't have
Speaker 2: time to respond to all messages, or certainly to feature
Speaker 2: all of them on the air here on listener Mail episodes,
Speaker 2: but we do read all the messages we get, so
Speaker 2: we really do appreciate everybody who takes the time to
Speaker 2: write in it genuinely means a lot to us. Let's see, Hey,
Speaker 2: if you're new to the show, what's the deal? What's
Speaker 2: going on with stuff to blow your mind? This is
Speaker 2: a listener mail episode. We typically are a science and
Speaker 2: culture podcast. You know, science is sort of our main beat,
Speaker 2: but we smash it in with a bunch of other disciplines.
Speaker 2: We like to talk about science and history, science and religion, psychology, folklore,
Speaker 2: all kinds of things like that. We do our core
Speaker 2: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Fridays we do
Speaker 2: a different kind of show called Weird House Cinema, where
Speaker 2: each week Rob and I just talk about a weird movie.
Speaker 2: We talk about well known movies, obscure movies, good bad.
Speaker 2: The only real criteria is that it's got to be weird.
Speaker 2: On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on
Speaker 2: Saturdays and Mondays we run episodes from the vault, older
Speaker 2: episodes of the show. Let's see. Oh huge, thanks as
Speaker 2: always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. And as
Speaker 2: I've said several times now, if you would like to
Speaker 2: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 2: or any other. To suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 2: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 2: contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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