Unraveling misleading popular science

23:06Remember the title was scientists found evidence. Our entire universe is trapped inside a black hole. Like that title is definitely not true. Yes. And was the article a bit better at describing the nuances or was the article pretty much leading off from the title? As usual, it's a gradation. The scientific paper behind it is fine. The article is a little bit too excited and the title is just flat out lying to you. All right, let's take a break and get to another flat out lying title when we get back.

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24:46Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. It's a sci-fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted. My first book was Divergent. And when that came out, like, because it was so popular, I think it attracted like mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge. And I think it was like critiques of things I liked when I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my like dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it.

25:28And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, I steered away from those little things that like make you feel pleasure when you read. But I also was like saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it. So that's this book. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. How's the new plays? Get your Wi-Fi figured out? I got T-Mobile 5G home internet and I'm loving it. It's the fastest 5G home internet. My old provider was so slow. Mine is slow. And only 35 bucks a month.

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26:38All right, welcome back. Today we're talking about science articles that way oversell the results they're talking about. And Daniel, can I read the next headline? Please do. Okay, here we go. Gravity may be key evidence that our universe is a simulation, groundbreaking new research suggests. Oh, this is fun. Yeah, and you know, This title is not nearly as bad as the other one because they use the word may and suggests. Okay. Right? So gravity may be key evidence. Research suggests. Like, kudos to this writer, this editor, whoever wrote this title, for, like, keeping some of the qualifiers in there.

27:13So you don't go running off to your grandma saying, see, I told you, scientists have proven we live in the matrix. That's right. I used to fight with my grandma about that all the time.

27:26So what's the science here? What do people actually do? Well, you know, we don't understand gravity. For gravity, we have Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is awesome and suggests that gravity isn't a force, but instead it's the curvature of space-time, crucially the invisible curvature of space-time. You cannot see the curvature. You just notice its effects, and its effects mimic the effects of a force. Things follow the curvature of space-time. If you can't see that curvature, it looks like something is applying a force to it. But we don't fully understand gravity. is lots of questions about it.

27:57We can't marry it with quantum mechanics. We know that Einstein's general relativity needs an upgrade. So people are still working on gravity and they should be. And they're exploring all sorts of crazy and fascinating ideas, string theory, loop quantum gravity, gravitons, all sorts of stuff. And there's an idea in the last couple of decades, it's sort of out of left field, which is my favorite kind of idea that suggests that gravity is not the bending of space-time and it's not a force like Newton, but it's some illusion that comes out of entropy of information in a two-dimensional universe. And our 3D universe is an illusion, a hologram from that 2D universe.

28:36All right. So it sounds like you are portraying this idea as something that isn't totally nuts. Not totally nuts. Not totally nuts? Question mark. Maybe we should have a whole episode on why it's not totally nuts, because it does kind of sound totally nuts. Well, you know what? The universe could be totally nuts, right? We have no guarantee that the universe isn't insane or isn't crazy. In fact, I kind of hope that it is. That's much more fun. And this is an idea that cropped up in the last few decades. It's called holography. And the idea is that we seem to live in a three-dimensional space and we have gravity, but people noticed that if you build a two-dimensional universe, right?

29:15So like just X and Y, no Z, but then you add quantum fuzziness to that universe, that that quantum fuzziness can act like a third dimension. It's like enough fuzziness there to encode what you would need to describe a third dimension. And then you can build a map from 2D plus quantum information to 3D. You can make arrows back and forth. Like this location in my 2D universe maps to that location in my 3D universe. Why would you want to do that? This seems like something fun for a math nerd on a Saturday afternoon, but why would anybody who cares about the universe want to do this? Because remember, we don't have a quantum theory of gravity.

29:51We don't understand quantum mechanics and gravity. So any way you can connect quantum theories with gravity is exciting. So people showed that in a 2D plus quantum stuff universe, you can just do quantum theories and then you can map them to the 3D universe and you get gravity. Whoa. So there is some weird connection. There's some hint between gravity and quantum mechanics. So that's holography. These guys are doing something slightly different. They're saying, think about that 2D universe with quantum stuff. Think about how energy flows in that quantum universe and think about entropy. Remember we had a whole episode about entropy and talked about how entropy is like the reason cold milk spreads out in your hot coffee or the reason that ice melts on a hot day is not just because energy flows.

30:35Energy flows to increase entropy, to increase the number of available microscopic states to a system. So people were thinking about energy flowing in this weird 2D universe that we might actually be living in, and then mapped that back to three dimensions. And they discovered, oh, actually, all you need is entropy. If you map entropy in this 2D world to the 3D world, you get gravity. So that's the entropic theory of gravity, which Eric Verlinde and other folks are exploring. And it's not totally insane. There's problems with it and unsolved issues, like with any Nissen theory. But it's totally a reasonable thing to be exploring and a fascinating idea.

31:12Like with physics in general, yeah. Like with physics in general. Hey, the whole thing is a work in progress, right? Or like with your kitchen. Who knows that's ever going to get finished? It's never going to get finished. The entropic theory of Kelly's home improvement projects. Yeah, probably never going to get finished. Let's have a race. Let's see if we figure out quantum gravity before Kelly finishes her kitchen. Oh, gosh. My marriage is on the line, I think. We've got to get the kitchen figured out sooner. So I started my career as an animal behaviorist, And I'm really interested in the like culture of certain fields.

31:44Do the people who study whether or not the universe is a simulation, like do those people act differently in their day to day lives? Like, does it impact their behavior? Yeah, good question. I'm not one of those people. Right. So I don't know. OK. I wonder if it really changes that. That's a great question because it measures whether they really believe it. Does it impact the way you live your life? I'm not sure. All right. Anyway, let's get back to the science. All right. So, so far we've explained entropic gravity. Now this paper is not about vanilla entropic gravity, which isn't weird enough.

32:18There's a guy who's built a version of entropic gravity, not using the normal entropy ideas, but information entropy. This is based on Shannon's theory of information. And it measures like how much information can be stored in a message, et cetera. And then the entropy of that information. And in this paper, he showed that if you think about the information stored in that 2D universe, and then you try to minimize the computational expense of simulating that universe, that those requirements translate into gravity in the 3D universe. So take your 2D universe and say, boy, this is complicated for me to simulate.

32:55What if I required entropy to act in a certain way that minimized that computation? And what he discovered is doing that effectively requires things to clump together, like as if matter was moving to reduce the computational, the informational cost in this universe. So he's playing with his 2D universe. He imposes some computational constraints. He discovers that imposing those constraints requires gravity in the 3D version of that universe. And he says, ooh, that's fascinating. Maybe our gravity is a consequence of people who are programming the simulation having a limitation on their computing.

33:31And so they decided the only kind of universe they can simulate is one that has to have this rule because they have a limit on their computers. And that's why we have gravity. I'll admit that it sounds like we are like skipping over some big black boxes and I'm not quite following all of the steps, but I see the general picture. And so he published this and it was given a lot more credit than it deserved. Yeah. So he published this, and this is a fine thing to research and the work is itself solid. And it's cool that he shows the universe works in a way that might make it easier to represent inside a computer.

34:07Does that suggest we live in a simulation? That's a really big leap. I mean, even think about this question. I feel like there's a lot of coverage of this in popular media that skips over a lot of important details. Like, remember that if our universe is a simulation, then what is the computer it's running on? It's running on a computer that's not in our universe. Our universe is in that computer. And what are the rules of physics that that universe has that that computer is following? We have no idea. Any more than like Super Mario can do experiments to measure laws of physics in our universe, right?

34:42He's living in an artificial universe. There's no way he can measure anything or deduce anything about the computing platform he is on. So like what is computationally expensive for these folks encoding the universe simulation? We have no idea because we don't know how their computer works. Even in our universe, we have different kinds of computers, right? Analog, digital, quantum, on which different things are expensive and different things are cheap. So how can we possibly speculate about what could be cheap or expensive on a computer that can simulate the universe following laws of physics from another universe we have no access to?

35:16It's totally impossible. It's really just popular science clickbait. And if you hear folks on podcasts talking about how like it's more likely we live in a simulation than not, then, you know, they're saying exciting things to get you to listen to the podcast. They're not really digging into the details. So lots of banana peels being smoked is what I'm coming away with here. Yeah, exactly. And really cool ideas, really fun to think about. Don't want to be negative about exploring crazy ideas, but like, let's be careful about what we've actually learned and what's just like exciting to think about.

35:48Yeah. So, all right. So we've got this idea here that's kind of out there, but is totally reasonable to explore. And you want to get people excited about it. Absolutely. It feels almost inevitable to me that people are kind of going to oversell it and get sort of hooked on the like kind of smoke and banana peels aspects of it. So do you think this result gets shared with the general public in any other way than like a kind of overblown way? Like, do you think there's an appetite amongst the general public? I mean, clearly there is for our listeners because like they ask very good, deep, in-depth questions.

36:22But like, how would you present this paper if you were writing the article? Yeah, it's a great question, right? We can't just criticize here. We should give some positive constructive tips. I think the options are either explain the caveats, right? Like sure, pull people in with the excitement of the possibility. And again, kudos to these writers for saying maybe suggests rather than explicitly claiming like in the previous article, but then also be like, well, that's exciting, but also you should know, or here's the work that needs to be done to actually connect the dots between these ideas or go deep enough like we do, or like we try to do to give people the understanding so that they can make those connections themselves.

37:02They can be like, okay, yeah, I mean, I see that, but I don't buy this step or that piece didn't really convince me or whatever. And like equip people with what they need to know, because I think, and I know you to think, which is why we're doing this project, that it's possible for folks outside of academia to understand this stuff. It can be explained in a way that's deep and insightful and accessible. And so I'd like to see much more of that because then people can draw their own conclusions. Rather than just being told you should accept X or you should accept Y, they'd be like, well, I think this, but I want to wait for that study or whatever.

37:33So either you got to do a deep dive or you got to include the caveats. And I think this article is not the worst, but it definitely didn't include enough caveats for my taste. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my personal strategy is I try to include all the caveats, but then I try to, you know, lean on Zach to tell jokes or something along the way, like, like try to get people to stay with you because it's hard because when you start getting into the caveats, I get that people lose interest. And there's so many of us that have short attention spans, but I think those caveats for the right audience is the fascinating thing.

38:04And I feel like the hard job of a science communicator is to make the caveats as interesting as they need to be to get people to stick with the explanations because otherwise you get headlines like the first one we talked about. All right. Let's move on to our last amazing headline, which we will get to after the break.

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39:27Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Will Wheaton, who played Gordy Lachance in Stand By Me 40 years ago and now narrates Stephen King's The Body, the novella that inspired it all. We talk about what it's like to return to a story that shaped his life, channeling his memories of River Phoenix in the recording booth, and why the friendships you have at 12 might be the most important ones you'll ever have. I know Gordy Lachance. I am Gordy Lachance. Like, I mean, even when I was a little kid, I was Gordy Lachance when I didn't know it.

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41:00All right, Daniel. Do we have free will? Quantum experiments may soon reveal the answer. Or so says this physics article that we are going to talk about now. Depending, of course, on what you mean by soon, reveal, answer, and quantum experiments. Oh, wow. Wow, that's a lot of caveats. Do we need to define free will or is that straightforward? Because that doesn't sound straightforward to me. Yeah, and the subtitle of this headline says, Whether or not we have partial free will could soon be resolved by experimenting quantum physics with potential consequences for everything from religion to quantum computers.

41:36Holy cow. So, yeah, pay attention. Oh, my God. Although I'll note we've already downgraded from free will to partial free will when you get to the subtitle. But, okay, so what's the science here? Yeah, so there is some really interesting stuff here in quantum physics on the edge of science and philosophy. It has to do with something we talk about in the podcast a lot, whether quantum mechanics really is random, whether the universe is deterministic. And so like brief history context, Newton and folks discovered that the universe follows laws and those laws seem to be deterministic. Like you throw a ball exactly the same way twice, it follows exactly the same trajectory.

42:14You fire a cue ball at an eight ball and you know exactly the angles and the masses, you can predict exactly what's going to happen. And this leads to a view of the universe as like a clockwork universe. Like given a moment in time, a snapshot in time, you can predict everything that happens. Where is there room in that universe for people making decisions? For Zach deciding, I'm going to eat Kelly's piece of cake or I'm going to leave it in the fridge, right? That's always a bad choice to eat my cake. But is he making a decision or is it just a consequence of a clockwork husband that you married, right?

42:46Everyone's always giving him excuses, man. He made a choice. Leave my cake alone. Quantum experiments may soon unravel Kelly's marriage. I feel like I'm getting mad at him for a cake he didn't even eat. I know, our hypothetical cake, yeah. That's right. So that's the pre-quantum view of the universe. Quantum mechanics comes along and says, oh, hold on a second. Actually, things are fundamentally random. You can have exactly the same experiment, shoot an electron at a target twice with the same initial conditions, and get different outcomes. because at the quantum level, the microscopic level, things are not determined.

43:22Only the probability is determined. So it's not like the universe is totally random and chaotic, but like the universe predicts, oh, the electron has a 70 % chance to do this and a 30 % chance to do that. And what actually happens depends on a roll of the die when you look, right? So that's the quantum introduction of randomness. And that gives people some relief because they imagine, okay, the universe is not totally deterministic. There's some fuzziness in there. And that's where philosophically free will tries to creep in. Okay. And you, just like living in a simulation, you feel like this is a reasonable connection between physics and free will?

43:57I wouldn't go that far. But there are interesting angles about these experiments and loopholes that we should explore. And some of them do have potential implications for free will. So like the reason that we think that quantum mechanics is fundamentally random is because of a series of really incredible ingenious experiments that go by the name of Bell's inequality or Bell's experiments. And these sought to answer the question, which is really, really difficult. How do we know that the universe is actually fundamentally random? Things are not determined until we measure, rather than things being determined before we measure and just unknown to us.

44:31You know, say, for example, Zach has two bags and he puts a red ball in one and a blue ball in the other one. and he gives you one of the bags and you haven't looked inside and you go off and you run a bunch of errands. Then Zach opens the bag and he sees, oh, he's got the blue one. You know instantly that Kelly has the red one, right? But it was determined in advance. We just didn't know. So people wanted to know like, well, is the universe like that where it really was determined? We just didn't know about it. These are called hidden variables. Or is the ball really uncertain? Is it really red or blue until Zach opens it and then it decides?

45:05And that seems like a really hard thing to distinguish, right? Like how could you possibly know? Because the only thing you can do is look at it and you can just see red or blue. So John Bell came up with this ingenious set of experiments and the experiments you can't tell from an individual run of the experiment. It's not like you see red, you see blue, you know the answer, right? Because both ideas, hidden variables or truly random predict the same thing there. But he came up with a set of experiments that of course don't use marbles in Kelly's kitchen. They use particles and particle spin and it's not red or blue, but it's spin up or spin down.

45:36And these experiments take advantage of the fact that particles have three directions where you can measure the spin, like three axes in space. And the quantum version of the universe predicts a difference in the correlations between the measurements in different directions than the hidden variables version. So Zach and Kelly have their bags and they randomly decide, okay, I'm going to measure the spin in this direction. And Kelly decides randomly, I'm going to measure the spin in that direction. If we look at the correlation between their measurements, quantum mechanics predicts a different correlation than the hidden variables version.

46:06Like if they both predict the same axis, they should get the same answer. If they predict different axes, there should be correlations in one theory that are different from correlations in the other theory. Crucial step there, they're randomly deciding which axis to choose. And the answer they got was not consistent with the idea that it was a hidden variable so that you could have known all along, but you only found out when you opened it, but that it actually is being determined the moment you open it. Exactly. Conclusively, over and over these experiments, mind-blowing conclusion is the universe really is fundamentally random.

46:37Things are not determined until you measure it. Like the universe can maintain an uncertainty. Really incredible. Requires like a total upheaval of your understanding of the nature of reality. Really mind-blowing. But there is a potential loophole here. And the loophole is, how do we know that Zach and Kelly's choices really are random? What if there's some correlation there so that they're making choices that are not random, they're determined by something else that happened earlier, so they're correlated in a way that confuses us, misleads us into thinking the quantum answer is right, but really it's super determined.

47:13The Wienersmiths are entangled in some way. Yeah. So this is a theory called super determinism that says like something that happened early, early on in the universe, some structure formation or some super intelligent alien designed this whole thing. So we would think that the universe is random, but really it's deterministic and we've been confused. And the way they're controlling us is by influencing the random choices, right? Those random choices are not really random. It's all downstream of something. And so people explore these ideas. And this article discusses some papers in philosophy about how you might be able to close these loopholes and figure out, is super determinism real?

47:55Can you test it? It's very hard to test. And so it explores these concepts. It doesn't suggest that we're going to learn the answer to free will. It's like, maybe we could try to close this super determinism loophole. But dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, free will is a much bigger question, right? And if you read the paper, philosophers don't even agree about what we mean by free will. What does free will even mean? Let's start with defining that. Some people think you can have free will even if the universe is deterministic. You just draw a dotted line around a certain set of processes and say, I'm calling this Daniel, and these are Daniel's choices, and we attribute those to him.

48:33And other people think the free will requires some supernatural thing that's separate from the physical universe where you have a mind realm that's influencing matter somehow in the physical universe. There's a whole set of ideas for what free will could even mean. So yes, this is a study in philosophy, not a set of quantum experiments, that touches on questions which are adjacent to free will, but it certainly doesn't suggest a set of experiments that are going to tell us conclusively, do we have free will or not? So did the paper mention free will in passing? Like, how did this all become about free will?

49:08Was that completely on the part of the science communicator? Well, again, the paper is reasonable and talks about free will because, you know, these questions do brush up against these issues of free will. But this article in The New Scientist, not my favorite source, definitely oversells it. And the title is, like, totally irresponsible in my view. And, you know, people have thought about this a lot already. People go to great lengths to make these Bells experiments not susceptible to super intelligent alien manipulation. The lengths they go to to make these choices random is hilarious. There were experiments done in 2015 where the decisions were determined by taking a bunch of bits from three independent sources.

49:49One of them is the digits of pi. Another are Strings Chosen at Random from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Back to the Future trilogy, episodes of Doctor Who, Saved by the Bell, and Star Trek. How did Saved by the Bell get in there? I think they were worried that they were only choosing nerdy things, and they were like, uh-oh, what if the aliens are only manipulating, you know, the nerd culture? So they're like, this is like the nerd view of what popular culture is. Like, let's do Saved by the Bell. Amazing. So if you want to affect these experiments and contrive some way to make them non-random, you have to manipulate the digits of pi and somehow influence the people who wrote all of those episodes of all of those shows so that you can end up with a set of experiments which seemed like they were random, but they weren't really.

50:38Okay. So we have gone to great lengths to back up Bell's experiments to solve the super determinism problem, but we have not yet weighed in on free will. That's right. And let's say that we close this loophole. We say, okay, super determinism, we've proven it's not true. We know the universe is fundamentally quantum. That still does not prove free will, right? Randomness is not free will, right? Even if we show the universe has some elements of randomness, that doesn't give you control over it, right? That just means that there's some parts that are probabilistic instead of deterministic. It's not even clear to me that it has any relevance to free will.

51:13It's just like seems intellectually adjacent to it. But it's not actually a trap door in which you can sneak in free will, in my view. So this is only an audio podcast. So the video people can't see that Daniel is gesticulating wildly and getting super worked up and almost knocked his coffee mug off the table. Well, you know, one of the things I love about physics is that it has philosophical implications that are exciting, that are fascinating. You can learn about where the universe comes from and how it works and all that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it's disappointing to me when people try to make those philosophical connections when they aren't there yet.

51:49Like, you know, let's reserve that for when we really do learn something deep about the universe. I also feel like every time a pop science article oversells something and makes it sound like science is about to answer a big question that it's really not even close to answering, you hurt the ability to communicate well with the public because they're like, oh, you guys have been promising answers to all this stuff and it's not happening. And I get that, like, to get your articles published, you need to convince an editor that you have the most exciting idea. But I feel like maybe it's the editor's job.

52:18Someone's job needs to be to make sure that we're not overselling things and making science feel like, you know, one, what are we even doing? New breakthrough means fusion is just around the corner. How many times have you read that article? Oh, my gosh. That's right. Yes, over and over again. And so anyway, it's very important. But OK, so I think the field needs to be doing a slightly better job. But Daniel, you promised us at the beginning that you were going to give us tips to make sure that we could be critical readers so that our BS detectors could go off when they needed to go off. So what should we be looking for?

52:49Yeah, so I read a lot of science that's outside of my field of expertise. I mean, if there's an article on particle physics, I can read it and tell what's nonsense and what isn't. But I can't always in other areas. So I have to learn to be a critical reader. So number one, I go to trusted sources. I like the New York Times science coverage. I like Quantum Magazine. and there are very, very few other places that I will really trust where if I'm reading something I don't understand, I can be like, well, I think I'm gonna believe this. And so you need to build up confidence with a source. Like they need to repeatedly cover things in a level-headed way.

53:20You need to see stuff that you understand covered well so that you can trust it when you don't understand it. And if your trusted source has not covered some big breakthrough in science, there's probably a reason. So if you're only seeing this in like sciencebuzz.com, then it's probably overblown. That's number one. I had the opportunity to write for the New York Times twice. And one thing that really impressed me about that process was they had an independent fact checker go through. And I had to provide citations for everything. They made sure all of my citations were good. And there were a couple places where I had a citation that was like 20 years old.

53:54And they're like, we want you to find a more recent reference. Convince us that this is still the case. And I was like, oh, nice. And I was able to do that, but I loved that they were like making me defend every single line of my article. So anyway, yeah, I've been impressed with how the New York Times does their science stuff. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I'm not going to speak to their political coverage or whatever. And I know they've taken a lot of hits fairly or unfairly for all sorts of coverage. But their science section is good. You know, their science writers know their science and do the work.

54:22And they're not just like, hey, consumer beware. It's up to you to decide whether to believe this. They're doing the work behind the scenes to try to make sure this stuff is legit, just like we try to do. Second piece of advice is ignore the headline. Usually the headline is not written by the person who wrote the article, right? It's written by some editor trying to get clicks. And often the author disagrees with the headline and was overruled, right? And so it's not the author article's fault. And it doesn't say that anywhere on the page. It's like, you know, crazy claim by, you know, reputable writer.

54:56and you're like, oh, I feel bad for that guy. Yep, yep. So be careful about that. Make sure you read the article, not the headline. And also in the article, look for comments from uninvolved scientists. Some articles are just regurgitations of press releases from universities who listen to scientists spew claims about their work. I discovered we all live in a black hole. Yay, reputable scientist. But did they go off and find somebody else in the field who knows what they're talking about, who is not involved and therefore has nothing at stake and can say, well, yeah, I read Daniel's paper and I think it's pretty solid.

55:31This is seminal work. Or, you know, I read Daniel's paper and I think these are big leaps and there's still a lot of work to be done. Look for those quotes because number one, it means the journalist did their job and consulted with experts and listen to what those other experts have to say. So I think that's an important part of any responsible bit of science journalism and you should look for it. Ed Young does such a great job with that. Often when my research gets covered by popular press, I don't read it partly because I'm going to get frustrated if it was wrong or if my quote was taken out of context.

56:02So I don't read it to avoid the frustration. But I read the articles that Ed Yong writes because I want to see like, oh, who did he ask and what is like a serious critique of the work? And every once in a while I will see like, oh, that's such and such that I oversold this a little bit. And yeah, maybe they're right. Anyway, I feel like I learned something from his science reporting because he digs so deep into everything. And anyway, that's – that's just – I never get tired of saying great things about Ed Yong's work. Well, it's so admirable when people have built up a brand of being reputable.

56:35It's hard work, right? Yeah. He's done all that hard work that boots on the ground reporting to understand is this right? Is this wrong? What is the nuance? What are the experts that say? What are ways to disagree with this? And he deserves that credibility, and it's rare. And so, yeah, I read everything Ed Young writes also for that same reason. And there are science writers I know and I follow and I will read whatever they write because it's good. Yeah. Yep. Amen. All right. Any other tips? Keep reading. You know, the more you read, the more you'll become literate in the topic and you'll be able to spot baloney on your own.

57:05My last tip is you should join our Discord community where anytime you come across an article that lands on your BS detector a little bit, you can pop it up on there and we'd be happy to tell you what we think. and there's a whole community of people willing to critically read the articles and weigh in. So find us at danielandkelly.org and there's a link to our Discord community there. And if you don't like Discord, you can just write to us. Send us an email to questions at danielandkelly.org and we will help you break it down. All right, until next time.

57:41Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K universe. Don't be shy, write to us. Some people use ChatGPT to answer questions.

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