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Spoiler: there isn't any link between playing video games and violence, but it is understandable that some people think there is. There are several papers discussing this and many land on both sides. Sqeaky and Mako tease out the BS but have most of an hour leftover for all the other things that may or may not have killed you in 2021, 5g, climate change, epoxy in bodily orifices…
Dysevidentia is an inability to reliably process or integrate evidence. This is podcast discusses, contemplates, mocks poor use of evidence.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: Warning. This show contains adult themes and language including death at our own hands.
SQEAKY: Dysevidentia is an inability to reliably process evidence and this is a podcast all about it.
MAKO: This episode was released on January 4th, 2022, and we are discussing dysevidentia because it is clear that millions of radioactive conspiracy theorists are suffering from it.
MAKO: I am Mako.
SQEAKY: And I am Sqeaky.
SQEAKY: We discuss logic and evidence because LA Noire trained us to press "X" to doubt.
SOURCE [0:47] Know Your Meme, Press X to Doubt - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/la-noire-doubt-press-x-to-doubt
MAKO: You can support us by becoming a Patron at patreon.com/dysevidentia.
SQEAKY: If you spent all of your money on video games to quench an infinite burning rage you can still like, subscribe, and leave a review to help us out.
MAKO: If you have a paper you have written or a small business to plug, let us know.
SQEAKY: Today we are going to discuss a bunch of things that did and didn't kill people in 2021.
MAKO: So like everything?
SQEAKY: I suppose that is more inclusive than we intended.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: Er.
*Sqeaky chuckles*
SQEAKY: I'll edit the "r" out, oops. We should've proofread and made sure that there was a complete sentence on that last line I had but...
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: We made it work, right?
MAKO: I think so.
SQEAKY: Okay.
*Guitar riff*
SQEAKY: Okay so we had another episode where we weren't made aware of any corrections. Either we're getting better or people have stopped submitting corrections to us.
MAKO: I think it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B personally.
SQEAKY: I definitely think we... we've said things that need correcting.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: I don't know what they are otherwise I'd be issuing a correction right now.
MAKO: That's how corrections work generally, yes.
SQEAKY: So what if we incentivize our listeners to try and give us more corrections?
MAKO: Depends on the incentive but that could be very incentivizing, yes.
SQEAKY: Well after last episode I guess we'll have to remove ball chortling. That didn't go over so well.
MAKO: That came as a surprise to no one.
*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*
SQEAKY: No seriously. We do want to hear about corrections from everybody in our audience so we were thinking that if you find something in our show that we need to issue a correction for, if you share that on social media make sure that we hear about it, we always put the links out there for our social media, you'll link to that episode, tell us what the... what the correction needs to be, we'll research and put in a correction next episode and ship you one of our flash drives with all of our episodes.
MAKO: They are pretty good flash drives. We both use... them for personal uses.
SQEAKY: Wink wink.
MAKO: Oh my god.
SQEAKY: Personal uses. No seriously, I have it on my keys with my keychain. I do stick things on it.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: But yeah they're really nice and we've sent out four of them to people who've supported us in giveaways in the past so hit them up on Twitter. All four of them are on there.
MAKO: Yep. Uh, a few of them have posted really good images of the flash drives and...
SQEAKY: Oh we should get some action shots!
MAKO: Action shots?
SQEAKY: I don't know what kind of action a flash drive gets into but I imagine being like thrown clear of an explosion or y'know diving from a helicopter to a boat or something- y'know just any action movie action shots would be great.
MAKO: Alright when you were describing all of that my mind immediately went to just put a flash drive... like draw a good beefy on it and --for good measure-- and uh put it in a pose with an attractive woman just like it's James Bond or something instead of like attractive woman it's just another one of the flash drives in a lake or something I don't know.
SQEAKY: Like the cover art to any 80s action movie?
MAKO: Yeah. Still spoof 80s movies but just do flash drives all the way down.
SQEAKY: Oh.
MAKO: And when you zoom in on the gun the flash drive is wielding it's just more flash drives.
SQEAKY: Brilliant.
MAKO: Yeah.
*Sqeaky laughs*
SQEAKY: So uh one thing we did miss. I don't know if this is a correction the news came out after we recorded but just before we released the episode, uh there was an Amazon worker who was out delivering packages during the tornadoes.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: They radioed in or called in to to drop their stuff off and they were told they'd be fired if they came back to the warehouse with any packages. So that was pretty ridiculous. We'll go ahead and have a link to that, the source yeah for that is The Verge.
SOURCE [3:46] Amazon worker in Tornado out on delivery fucked by amazon - https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/17/22841667/amazon-delivery-driver-illinois-tornado-warehouse-destruction
MAKO: Mhm.
SQEAKY: And we also have one more Patron supporting us. Uh, Rachelle Walters is supporting us at the Evidence Supporter level so thank you very much for that, we appreciate it.
MAKO: Thank you.
SQEAKY: And as always there's a bunch of ways to get a hold of us. We have a lot of different contact points on the different social medias. You can support us or reach out to us at patreon.com/dysevidentia. We have a subreddit, r/dysevidentia. Tweet at us @dysevidentia. You can watch these podcasts on YouTube or talk to us directly on Discord or email us at contact@dysevidentia.com.
SUPPORT US [4:08] Dysevidentia on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/dysevidentia
CONTACT [4:10] Dysevidentia on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Dysevidentia/
CONTACT [4:12] Dysevidentia on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dysevidentia
CONTACT [4:14] Dysevidentia on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBbU3rnK52CXUkK0cJ-o29g
CONTACT [4:16] Dysevidentia on Discord - https://discord.gg/EZtcgdsCDA
CONTACT [4:19] Dysevidentia by email - Contact@dysevidentia.com
MAKO: Discord link can be found in the show notes.
SQEAKY: Thank you. Just totally spaced that.
*Guitar riff*
SECTION [4:25] SPONSOR
*Sqeaky screams in rage*
SQEAKY: I fucking hate this game!
*Sqeaky smashes his keyboard*
MAKO: Did the game make you violent, Sqeaky?
SQEAKY: Abso-fucking-lutely.
MAKO: Hold on- Is that Tetris?
SQEAKY: Not getting a long piece makes me want to use all of the second amendment.
*Sqeaky cocks gun*
MAKO: Woah woah woah. Calm down, calm down. You are gaming on a machine from ABK Kustomz. You can play any game you want.
SQEAKY: Yeah, I suppose so.
*Mako starts typing*
MAKO: Here you go. Calm down with some Bulletstorm, Postal 2, Mortal Kombat, PUBG, Unreal Tournament, God of War, Call of Duty, and DOOM.
SQEAKY: Oh thanks! Those are all great games to relax to. And with this PC assembled by experts custom for my gaming needs, it'll be everything I need.
MAKO: And anyone ordering a new custom PC can save ten percent by using code evidence at abkkustomz.com.
SPONSOR [5:09] Get a custom computer from expert assemblers, use code evidence for 10% off - https://abkkustomz.com/
*Guitar riff*
SECTION [5:12] COVID Minute
SQEAKY: News in COVID. Normally we try to move the COVID minute around to get to the main content but we're talking about things that'll kill you in 2021.
MAKO: COVID was definitely one the uh, top contenders.
SQEAKY: Yeah. This is still a bit morbid so maybe we move through this one to get to the funny deaths.
MAKO: Maybe.
SQEAKY: You're just staring at me like how could you say that.
MAKO: Well I mean the circumstances are funny- we'll get to it, we'll get to it, we'll get to it. Let's just get through this.
SQEAKY: Okay okay. Right now we're sitting at about 5.4M deaths worldwide, about 840,000 of those are just in the US. We are still leading the numbers on that.
MAKO: So Trump has made America great again. We're number one!
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: We are number one here. You brought up a...
MAKO: Yeah. So, uh, going over COVID headlines, one thing that caught my eye was just how aggressively cases in Florida, for example, are surging. They reported on the numbers for the week last Sunday before our recording that there were 124,865 cases of COVID-19 reported and that was up 332.9% over the previous week.
SOURCE [6:00] COVID surge in Florida: Cases rise 332.9% in one week, state among fastest-spreading in US - https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2021/12/27/covid-florida-cases-deaths-surge-christmas/49575381/
SQEAKY: That's a fuckload. What are they doing down there? I mean nothing with masks or vaccines clearly but what else are they doing?
MAKO: Yeah the state is pushing a whole lot of anti-mask anti-vaccine propaganda down there which is why this one's... easily the most predictable explosion of COVID.
SQEAKY: I wish we could- Alright I don't want to say I wish we could be in a pandemic, but if we have to be in a pandemic, I wish we could be in one that wasn't relevant to this show.
MAKO: That'd be nice.
SQEAKY: We just don't need propaganda about a deadly disease not hurting people and then it kills a bunch of people.
*Sqeaky sighs*
MAKO: The source goes on to say that hospital admissions were up to 4,979 that week compared to 3,039 from the previous week. So that is also an aggressive jump up.
SQEAKY: So from about 3,000 to just about 5,000.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Yeah that's an extra 2,000 or so cases.
MAKO: Yep.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: That's a lot. That's actually admissions. That means that there's 5,000 new ones this week compared to 3,000 new ones the week before.
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: Well that is terrible but there have been some changes on the basic guidance. People have been talking about Omicron and are freaking out. I still don't have all of the information on it. Things are changing so fast that it's hard to follow this and keep it straight so just deferring to experts continues to seem like a good idea. Like the CDC right now and we'll link, we have a CDC.gov page where they're recommending pretty much all of the same things. Keep wearing masks, keep your distance, keep getting vaccines and boosters, and it seems like in general, if you are vaccinated you're not likely to suffer a severe case of Omicron even if you get it. It does break through the booster but it- a lot of people have been reporting sniffle-like conditions like it feels like a cold if you have the vaccine and are boosted. But then we have a few deaths that have been reported that are just from unvaccinated people. As far as I know so far. I'm sure we'll get some vaccinated deaths soon but the statistics are going to be extremely lopsided on this if the vaccine works at all.
SOURCE [7:34] CDC Guidance on Omicron - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/omicron-variant.html
MAKO: Yeah. It... we have no reason to believe it's going to be anything other than pretty much more of what we've already seen.
SQEAKY: And the CDC also shortened their quarantine recommendation time. If you're asymptomatic and you can wear masks the whole time you're around other people, they've shortened down to five days. So they don't think people will be spreading COVID longer- y'know any further out than that most of the time.
SOURCE [8:19] 5 day quarantine period with masks - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-cuts-covid-19-isolation-guidance-5-days-omicron-surge/
*Sqeaky sighs*
MAKO: So that helps some people somewhat.
SQEAKY: I guess. There's been some cynicism around this. I don't have any links to sources but I've heard people saying that they think this is just a way to get people pushed back into the economy faster.
MAKO: It almost certainly is.
SQEAKY: You think?!
MAKO: Well I- So I don't know... I imagine governments and agencies being multiple people, I imagine motivations differ from person to person. I would completely believe that some of the motivations are economical. And well it does make some sense on the surface of it for asymptomatic people to have less strict requirements. The problem with this is that a lot of this is based on an honor system and people who shouldn be quarantining for more than five days are going to read this and be like oh clearly that's me kaderp.
SQEAKY: So they're going to be like 'Well I'm asymptomatic, all I've got is a little coughing and sneezing, that's normal for me.' Oh.
MAKO: Yeah that's... that's definitely going to be someone.
SQEAKY: I see what you're saying. It gives- it gives leverage to shitheads to be shittier.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Well.
MAKO: But-
SQEAKY: That's all nuance.
MAKO: It is and but like the motivations for making this happen, I think it's... there's a few different reasons. Some of this I believe is fact-based, some of it I do believe is economic recovery focused, some of it is just people wanting to put something out there to make it look like there is a light at the end of the tunnel for the pandemic because a lot of people are experiencing, in different ways, burnout for the pandemic as a whole.
SQEAKY: Yeah. This has dragged on for... it's gonna be two whole years soon.
MAKO: So if you can give something to the people where you're giving them a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel as I've said before, then that can have some value and I'm sure that's a motivation for some people that decided to change the guidance as well.
SQEAKY: Well, even if we're gonna be cynical and say that the guidance is all from purely a place of science, listening to the CDC's cynical advice is definitely better than listening to Kevin Sorbo?
BULLSHIT SOURCE [10:20] Kevin sorbo might try to kill you- https://twitter.com/ksorbs/status/1474496096906924037
MAKO: Apparently. Dude has just gone off the rails.
SQEAKY: Do you want to read the tweet or should I?
MAKO: I will read the tweet. So, Kevin Sorbo, December 24th, 2021 on 3:43 PM from his iPhone.
*Sqeaky laughs*
SQEAKY: He's too dumb to turn that off?
MAKO: Yep. Uh he tweeted, quote: "If you're perfectly healthy and your family makes you get a COVID shot or test just to see them for Christmas, get a new family." end quote.
SQEAKY: Yeah so don't seek medical advice from celebrities. That that tweet is going to get a few people killed statistically.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: And just because Kevin Sorbo was washed up, do not take that as a statement on his hygiene or medical credentials.
MAKO: Damn.
*Sqeaky laughs*
MAKO: There's a few obvious problems with this. Probably the biggest obvious one is that somehow, Kevin Sorbo, not knowing who you are or what you're existent is or any of the extenuating circumstances for anything is is giving you advice on getting a new family as if you can just go to a convenience store and pick one up.
SQEAKY: I'm sure he's just being sarcastic with that part of it.
MAKO: Eh maybe.
SQEAKY: The part I take issue with is the general opposition towards preventing the spread of disease.
MAKO: Well he- His comment about getting a new family is he's highlighting that he thinks people that are taking the pandemic seriously are hyperbolic and need to calm down.
SQEAKY: I wanna see Kevin Sorbo get this. I want to see him tweeting from a ventilator. It won't change anything, we've had lots of people who say the pandemic is fake and it's not a big deal and then they tweet from a ventilator and it seems like the people who need to see that never do.
MAKO: He... is just. Just wrong. 'Cause he did say it makes it look like it's reasonable by saying "If you're perfectly healthy".
SQEAKY: Yeah but you don't fuckin' know that. You don't have an internal sense of 'I have a disease or not'. Right, there's tons of people spreading this who are presymptomatic-
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: -that's better than saying asymptomatic. And it's part of why the CDC's guidance is five days. If you're presymptomatic, on day three or four usually you get worse. You start coughing and sneezing and running a fever and you're really fucking contagious right there. But you don't have an internal sensor of 'I'm contagious or not'. That just isn't one of the senses humans are equipped with.
MAKO: Yeah. If people are being responsible and quarantining and taking every conceivable protection beyond the quarantines as well, that's one thing kinda, but that's clearly not the sentiment that Kevin Sorbo is going for here. The sentiment is that pretty much get over the virus is what he's saying.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: Well, fuck.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: The first time I read that my brain parsed it as "death by our own hands" and I was like 'Woah'.
SQEAKY: I mean, a lot of these are death by our own hands.
MAKO: Well, more personal than that. I thought you were implying we, the podcast hosts, were murdering people.
SQEAKY: We have a whole hour left.
MAKO: What?
*Guitar riff*
SECTION [13:07] VIDEO GAMES AND VIOLENCE
MAKO: So there is this... I don't wanna say widely held belief because it really isn't widely held outside of suburban soccer moms and the media but this notion that video games cause violence, that video games are substantially influential in the development of people.
SQEAKY: It's a wrong persistent idea just like how I thought and a lot of other people think that glass is a liquid. It's super wrong, there's no reason to believe it. But-
MAKO: Enough people say it you're going to believe 'cause well if it wasn't true then why do so many people say it.
SQEAKY: Yeah. It's just more of that human desire to trust the people around us.
MAKO: One of the best quotes I've seen... aside from the Pac-man quote. Pac-man quote is pretty fuckin' fantastic.
SOURCE [13:48] Pac-man Quote - https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/1dq2v6/if_pacman_had_affected_us_as_kids_wed_all_be/
SQEAKY: Well you get to say it now.
MAKO: Okay let me pull it up.
SQEAKY: Don't forget to throw the source in there for the Pac-man quote.
*Mako typing*
MAKO: Oh my god. Okay. Found a Reddit post. It's good enough, it's not great. They're linking to Wikipedia but apparently the quote on Wikipedia was removed.
SQEAKY: Nice.
MAKO: Okay. So the Pac-man quote goes "If Pac-man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
SQEAKY: So simple and so stupid. It was about eating ghosts. Not a lot of us are doing that either.
MAKO: Well if you are munching the right pills you might be convinced you're eating ghosts.
SQEAKY: Those some good pills. Can we get them as a sponsor?
MAKO: No.
SQEAKY: Can't finish saying that shit.
MAKO: For those of you that are listening that are unaware of the existence of raves, he just described a rave.
*Sqeaky chuckles*
SQEAKY: I don't know, raves have more dancing than Pac-man but okay.
MAKO: Maybe. But of course one of the comments that I'm seeing in this Reddit thread is "Lindsay Lohan must have loved this game as a kid."
*Sqeaky squeaks*
SQEAKY: Terrible.
MAKO: Fuckin' I don't even- Okay, anyway. The second best quote on this topic I've ever heard and I- this is not something I can source unfortunately 'cause it was- came up in a conversation with somebody but they said "Video games absolutely do influence kids as they're growing up which perfectly explains the explosion of civil engineers in 2000."
SQEAKY: Which game-
MAKO: SimCity 2000.
SQEAKY: Fuck! So good! So good!
MAKO: Did we experience an explosion of civil engineers? No! Like- But everyone fucking played SimCity 2000 so...
SQEAKY: And for- when we say everybody in both of these contexts clearly we're talking about people in a given age demographic.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: And if you haven't had a chance to go back and play some of these old games, even if you're younger, Pac-man has a certain addictive quality to it.
MAKO: Yeah so not literally everybody of course-
SQEAKY: Yeah.
MAKO: -but it definitely had the kind of market penetration where you might think that that was the case. Like not everyone has seen Game of Thrones, but if you talk to a random stranger you're gonna have pretty good odds that they've seen Game of Thrones and that you'll be able to engage in a conversation with them about it.
SQEAKY: And even if you haven't seen it there's a real chance that they-
MAKO: They know references to it.
SQEAKY: And that's how big SimCity was during Mako and I's childhood.
MAKO: Yeah. You had a really easy time talking to strangers about it 'cause it was just that common.
SQEAKY: 'Cause on all the computers that the... the different schools I went to up through high school... yeah, yeah, I don't have a propensity to build cities. That's... that's a really good point. Again though, we like to defer to experts.
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: So I've got a metastudy and I like these metastudy things 'cause they went out and cited a whole bunch of other studies.
SOURCE [16:20] Metaanalysis of the relationship between violent video game play and physical aggression over time - https://www.pnas.org/content/115/40/9882
SOURCE [16:26] A study that finds not correlation between video games and violence - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17914672/
SOURCE [16:26] And again no gaming and violence correlation - https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-11-08/no-evidence-violent-video-games-lead-to-real-violence-study
SOURCE [16:26] Harvard finds liitle correlation but suggests reasonable steps if you are a worried parent - https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/violent-video-games-and-young-people
MAKO: Mhm.
SQEAKY: I will link to this study and several others. This one was from pnas.org.
MAKO: Woah. Pnas? Pnas.
SQEAKY: Pnas.
MAKO: Penis?
SQEAKY: No! The... the... Fuck what was it? It was the... Oh god let me find it.
*Sqeaky types*
MAKO: It was the penis.
SQEAKY: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
MAKO: Okay that's not penis.
SQEAKY: P-nas.
MAKO: That's what I said.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: Moving on. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and a few others including ones that take nearly the exact opposite stance that I take from Harvard and they're linked at health.harvard.edu. In their study they pointed out that ninety-seven percent of kids played video games and sixty-seven percent of kids played violent video games and the different ways we measure aggression, they're not smooth or seemless and it's hard to get a good objective rating for this and even when they do get some good measurement for this there's rarely a consistent correlation so forget about causation. If you want to prove that A leads to B, first you have to find a correlation between these things and then if there's a correlation, you have to figure out what it takes to say okay, A causes B. In a lot of cities, there's a correlation between ice cream sales and crime. Well, just noting that there's a correlation isn't good enough. Correlations can imply causation, but they don't guarantee it or necessitate it. Ice cream doesn't cause crime, but heat temperature, the ability to be outside instead of the snow definitely correlate with ice cream sales and casual crimes of opportunity. If you can't even get to correlation, the thought's fucked. But then once you get to correlation you have to get to a mechanism that causes it.
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: Now, not all of the experts agree that video games don't cause violence and don't cause aggression.
MAKO: Is this another one of those cases where they're like four out of five dentists say one thing and you're left thinking 'Who the hell is that one dentist?'
*Sqeaky chuckles*
SQEAKY: Um, almost. Back to the metaanalysis to explain. The one published in Pnas.
MAKO: Hehehehe.
SQEAKY: They found that if you average a large amount of these studies that you can find some correlation with violence. But they also point out, and let me read a quote from the study: "Ferguson has leveled four criticisms at research purporting to show that video game violence increases real-world aggression. many studies that support such a link use measures of "nonserious aggression", accessibility of aggression related words, aggression related feelings, that inflate effect-size estimates. Many studies do not include important covariates as statistical controls and hence any observed effects may be spurious consequences of third variable relationships." Okay that's the end of that quote. Again that's in Pnas. The link's in the show notes. But what that means is every time that these studies have shown aggression, they're not using actual aggression, they're not using violence, they're using aggression-related words, things that society tolerates, and the scientists aren't using appropriate controls to weed out things like wealth, race, socio-economic conditions, education. So if they're not taking these into control and just saying 'ah you have video games', they're not doing their due diligence working on correlation and causation as we discussed earlier. And another quote that this goes straight to the bias of these papers to produce a result. In the scientific world if you produce results you're more successful. Let me read this quote: "There is a bias to publish studies supporting a video game violence to aggression link as opposed to those reporting a null effect. And even if one accepts the existence of a video game violence to aggression relationship, estimated effect size typically reported is exceedingly week." When you weed out the poorly done papers you wind up with fifteen of them and fourteen all agree there's no correlation.
MAKO: Ha. Lovely.
SQEAKY: Why don't we pick on just one of the bad ones from some Chinese scientists?
SUBPAR SOURCE [20:08] Some Chinese scientist disagree and think there is a correlation - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790562/
MAKO: Oh god. 'kay.
SQEAKY: And they have this ridiculous URL that's from some National Institute of Health in China but they they managed to get 547 undergraduates together and they were able to ask them about which of them play violent video games and they were able to correlate some aggression on to this. So let me just heap on all of the problems with this study.
MAKO: Sure.
SQEAKY: First it's small.
MAKO: What's the sample size?
SQEAKY: 547.
MAKO: That's not as bad as I feared. It's not great but it's not terrible.
SQEAKY: And it's only Chinese undergrads.
MAKO: That is a little bit specific, yes.
SQEAKY: And they do pretty much all of the stupid things that the other scientist was complaining about. One of their metrics for aggression was "Not making eye contact" and "Word choice". But they do have academic rigor. They cite a bunch of competing papers and try to explain why they disagree.
MAKO: Oh. Good for them. Confident.
SQEAKY: And they only have a confidence value of ninety-five percent. Or to flip that around that's a p value of five percent, meaning that there's a one-in-twenty chance they're just wrong.
RELEVANT XKCD [21:06] Jelly beans - https://xkcd.com/882/
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: So if nineteen other papers disagree, so like ninety-five percent of 'em, you'd expect one-in-twenty papers to get this wrong if they all have a confidence of ninety-five percent.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: And then their correlation amount? Super tiny. Only nine percent of their weird metrics for measuring aggression were attributable to video game exposure by their own metrics.
MAKO: Oh.
SQEAKY: But they reported that variances in their self-reported numbers by up to as much as fourteen percent. So their correlation is smaller than the- Yeah, so it's a garbage in garbage out situation.
MAKO: Fun.
SQEAKY: It wasn't blinded and blinded means that you're hiding from both the participants and the researchers the results of the experiment. And ideally you want an experiment that's double-blinded so the people performing the experiment aren't the ones drawing the conclusions, that prevents any sort of accidental putting your hand on the scale to adjust the experiment one way or the other.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: So they didn't even have a single-blind, everybody knew going into it what was going on, this was just open to all kinds of bullshit. I'll find some easy grok example video on blinding and I'll make sure to include them in the show notes. I'm not picking on these people just 'cause they're Chinese or just 'cause they're on the other side, but when you look at every paper, every study, claiming there's a correlation between video games and violence, they're all of this low quality. This paper is just poorly assembled. And you'll find that universally. And sometimes you'll find that on the side saying there is no correlation but then you can find a bunch of others that just have really high quality.
SOURCE [22:10] Easy to understand short video on blinding - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbU5kHC9yH0
MAKO: Seems to be something that goes through the rounds every five or so years, it's brought up again, people think that oh there's this new proof that clearly video games cause violence and there's another round of study and it's the same thing like no no they're not.
SQEAKY: And this also just flies in the face of the evidence we have.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: If we know that sixty-seven percent of all kids everywhere play violent video games, you'd expect crime to be on the rise but it just isn't.
SOURCE [22:57] Crime is down per episode 0005 - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/shooting-down-gun-myths
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: In most places, even us here in the ultraviolent US, violent crime is on the decline and we'll go ahead and cite back to episode five where we poured through the Bureau of Justice Agency Statistics something?
MAKO: No just-
SQEAKY: Now you can't remember it. I have infected you.
MAKO: The Bureau of Justice Statistics I think is what it is but I'm not actually sure anymore.
SQEAKY: Yeah I think it is. I think that's- but why- Don't trust me on that.
MAKO: Yeah no of course not.
SQEAKY: Trust our research in evidence five. We wrote it down, and we recorded it.
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: But violent crime is definitely down.
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: If two-thirds of people are playing violent video games, why isn't crime going up? Why has it been going down?
MAKO: Yeah. Especially in like in the last two decades when violent video games started to really take hold, like what-
SQEAKY: Yeah, our sponsor spot. Didn't we list like half a dozen violent video games?
MAKO: Yeah. So why hasn't crime just skyrocketed in the last two decades because of all of these games?
SQEAKY: Yeah the first game we list, Bulletstorm, is all about shooting people with guns to get murder combos.
MAKO: Well hold on. Hold on. It's not just shooting people with guns. You're also kicking people, you're impaling people, you're whiping them around with a Lightening Whip into other environmental hazards and yes, you're trying to combo these things together for a maximum score of maximum murder.
SQEAKY: And yet we have no one doing this in real life. Zero attacks with a lightning whip.
MAKO: Yup.
*Sqeaky chuckles*
SQEAKY: Ah it's so dumb. This section has to be necessarily short. There's only so many times we can say "There's no evidence for this thing" and here's the counter-evidence. There's no increase in violent crime but there's a huge increase in video game playing and violent video game playing.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Now we'll argue playing Tetris will make you fucking violent. Those long pieces won't fucking come.
MAKO: Okay so aside from Tetris anger, there is something to be said about lag in online video games and the anger that causes.
SQEAKY: Okay I feel you there. You'll be totally in the lead, your internet connection cut out for one second and you just get killed like fourteen times and you just don't know how.
MAKO: Yeah you're like oh this is a Hail Mary I need in order to finish the match and then your interest just chokes right there for only the necessary moments in order to lose.
*Sqeaky sighs in pain*
MAKO: Yeah that feels bad. That feels real bad.
SQEAKY: I'm gonna stop playing online games.
MAKO: No!
SQEAKY: Single-player games only.
MAKO: No! Internet connections are getting more stable.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: Since this section has to be short, we figure we would just segue into a bunch of other things that dysevidentia sufferers claimed would kill us.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: Today we are gonna discuss a bunch of things that you did and- Wait not you.
SQEAKY: A bunch of things that you did to kill people in 2021.
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: Sign up for Wren to offset your carbon emissions so you can kill fewer people in 2022.
MAKO: Talking about you, Billy.
*Sqeaky laughs silently*
MAKO: Sorry. Um, apologies to any Billy listeners out there.
*Guitar riff*
SECTION [25:36] 5G, Climate Change, and other stupid things that may have killed people
SQEAKY: Did you want to talk a little bit about 5G.
MAKO: Oh my god. Okay. So 5G is the fifth generation cellular network technology.
SQEAKY: So it's not even just one thing it's like a bunch of different technologies.
MAKO: Yeah of course. There's a lot of things that go into creating a cellular network.
SQEAKY: So this is kind of like when people say "The vaccine will manipulate your DNA" well which vaccine there's like seven of them and a bunch of them are just normal vaccines it's like...
MAKO: Well the implication is all of them in that case.
SQEAKY: Which is just- just not coherent.
MAKO: Well, if you're ignorant enough anything can seem coherent.
SQEAKY: Yeah! You can solve any problem with enough ignorance or brute force.
*Mako sighs*
MAKO: But anyway. So yeah, it's a technology that's being rolled out. A bunch of people that are listening are probably already familiar with 5G, I've known a couple of people that even needed to upgrade their phones for the sake of 5G.
SQEAKY: Me. I'm one of those.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Cricket kicked me off, that sucked.
MAKO: Sqeaky is one of them. So 5G is a pretty common thing for a lot of people and in the buildup to establishing a bunch of 5G towers in the necessary service areas and still ongoing to this day, a bunch of people have been trying to argue about the dangers of 5G. And in some cases they have even tried to connect it to the current pandemic saying that 5G towers are what caused COVID.
SQEAKY: We're probably going to have to do a whole episode on this 'cause there have been terrorist bombings of 5G towers.
MAKO: Yeah. So these networks and the companies that manage them have started to try and disguise the 5G towers in order to protect them. Like start to dress them up as trees and whatnot and that's actually been somewhat successful near as I can tell.
SQEAKY: Back when 2G and 3G were new, I remember them doing that with towers just to make them less unsightly. We're now doing that as a counter-terrorism measure?
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: Podcast listeners you can't hear but I am just blinking 'cause I am literally speechless. Tree disguise as counter-terrorism. Okay. Okay.
MAKO: So this is of course bullshit and we'll cover more of the details as to why it's bullshit in a moment but in The Netherlands recently there were a few people that were selling some jewelry that claimed to protect you from the 5G.
*Sqeaky laughs*
MAKO: Which on the face of it that doesn't make much sense like how does jewelry protect you from 5G, it should just be metal, how is that gonna help you if it's just wrapped around your neck or your wrist or whatever.
SQEAKY: Yeah.
MAKO: Like how does that help and I'm pretty sure nobody can give me a coherent answer 'cause I'm pretty sure there is no coherent answer.
SQEAKY: But dysevidentia sufferers don't need a coherent answer, they need-
MAKO: No-
SQEAKY: -whatever makes them happy.
MAKO: False hope for the other things that they've been made fearful of.
SQEAKY: Yeah! And sometimes that false hope just needs to be emotions, sometimes it needs to be a bad explanation, just-
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: It's different for everybody. There's no one... Ugh.
MAKO: So jewelry was sold in The Netherlands, advertising that it protects you from 5G. Sold successfully I guess I should add like actual units were sold. But these were investigated by... Let me actually pull it up and get the actual name of the authority.
*Mako types*
SQEAKY: Okay, I'm curious.
MAKO: Woah that's in a language I can not read. I went too far.
SQEAKY: Oh damn look at that!
MAKO: Yeah... So Dutch authorities announced- or stated that these products were actually radioactive which is weird 'cause they could just use any normal jewelry metal, claim it has 5G protections and then they wouldn't be in this shit but no, they instead decided to use radioactive materials to create the jewelry.
SOURCE [28:52] 'Anti-5G' jewelry and accessories are radioactive, Dutch authorities warn - https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/anti-5g-jewelry-and-accessories-are-radioactive-dutch-authorities-warn-1.5712830
SOURCE [28:52] Anti 5g jewelry is sometimes radioactive - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211220/06593748153/anti-5g-jewelry-found-to-be-radioactive-dangerous.shtml
SQEAKY: So I heard that the radiation was from thorium containing either ores or thorium powers mixed into the jewelry as it was assembled and being extremely cynical, one might say it was there so that some effect could be felt if the jewelry were mildly warm, the person selling it might say 'Yeah that warmth is it absorbing the 5G protecting you!' Or if you get a little red spot on your skin or y'know a rash or something after y'know wearing it for a month or two or ten or however long it takes for cancer to set in people could say 'Look that was caused by the 5G, you need to buy another bracelet to protect you!'
MAKO: Could be if we're going for maximum cynicism.
SQEAKY: Yeah I don't have evidence for that.
MAKO: They could also just use the catchphrase they're like 'Hey what you're feeling is the toxins being filtered out.'
SQEAKY: Oh my god. Absolutely.
MAKO: That's way too common.
SQEAKY: Yeah any time somebody's trying to sell you something and it removes generic toxins and they can't list specific toxins, they're full of shit.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Or they're selling you carbon. Just plain ol' carbon. Carbon does absorb a lot of toxics but there's problems with that and it gets packaged as a medicine 'cause you shouldn't just eat activated carbon.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Anyway.
MAKO: That's bad. So-
SQEAKY: Unless a doctor tells you to.
MAKO: Yeah so there's radiation. It's not like horribly radioactive. Like you're not going to wear this for a day and suddenly get cancer.
SQEAKY: What about superpowers?
MAKO: You're not gonna get superpowers either.
SQEAKY: Oh, okay.
MAKO: Yeah, trust me, I'm right there with you. It just is not a thing, sorry.
SQEAKY: Should I take off this radioactive cock ring?
MAKO: Probably?
SQEAKY: I don't wanna go deeper into the jokes for radioactive cock ring.
MAKO: Sure.
SQEAKY: The jokes for rashes write themselves but I don't think I wanna get that crass.
MAKO: Ugh okay, moving on. So, yeah it's not horribly radioactive. It is something that you would have to be wearing twenty-four hours a day for a full year in order to receive a radiation dose that hits the limits that were set by the same Dutch authorities as for what is safe so quite a bit of exposure. But I mean for someone who's not warned about this that thinks they're actually being protected by 5G that's not unrealistic-
SQEAKY: Yeah.
MAKO: in the course of this product.
SQEAKY: If you think it's protecting you from something harmful, why would you ever take it off?
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Plenty of people wear a bracelet or a necklace forever.
MAKO: Like even in the shower, I mean there's... Yeah. As long as it's not going to- the water isn't going to do damage to the jewelry and looking at it it doesn't look like jewelry that would be damaged in the water.
SQEAKY: Yeah we've got a couple sources so you can take a look at the pictures, both of them have this pendant, looks like it's a fake chunky plastic thing or maybe-
MAKO: Yeah it's plastic.
SQEAKY: -metal or enamel. Yeah. But we have ctvnews.ca and techdirt.com if you want to take a look at these.
MAKO: Yeah so if you don't have to take it off for things like that and you think it's protecting you, yeah you're going to wear it and nobody tells you otherwise you're going to wear it for a very long time until it stops being convenient or until you get a better protection. So even though it seems like a lot to have to wear this 24/7 for a whole year, that's entirely realistic for a lot of these people.
SQEAKY: I kind of want to make and sell faraday cage kits now. I saw a little faraday cage you wrap around your bed, it'll be an actual faraday cage but there's no reason to have a faraday cage over your bed but I bet we could convince these people to part with a couple hundred bucks for this. We just mail them a whole bunch of aluminum extrusion and copper mesh and nuts and bolts, boom faraday cage.
MAKO: Yeah. The jewelry was sold, they were told that they needed to stop selling it, it is unclear how many units were sold in The Netherlands, it is also unclear if this jewelry was sold over the internet and how far it's gotten. That part of the investigation is still ongoing.
SQEAKY: I heard some people were selling it on Alibaba but I didn't get a good source for that.
MAKO: Yeah I wouldn't be surprised.
SQEAKY: Everything gets sold there.
MAKO: Like you said there are- I couldn't find sources on any such thing either.
SQEAKY: So like video game violence, demonstrating that 5G is harmless is another one of those things where you're just trying to prove a negative. We have tons of experience using radio communications and it's been harmless.
MAKO: Well-
SQEAKY: We know which radio- or which electromagnetic frequencies are harmful, which ones generally aren't, but you have some research here?
MAKO: Kinda. I had the ability to go into way more depth than this but I was like ugh this is a lot. Like- So a lot of the research that is out there is like you said, it's just not harmful. The specifics as to why it's not harmful largely come down to ionizing versus non-ionizing radiation and when you- and like ionizer radiation is where like actual DNA damage can occur.
SOURCE [33:10] The CDC on Ionizing vs non-ionizing radiation - https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.html
SQEAKY: So bigger energy frequencies move more energy per photon and when they hit material it changes the charge of it either making it negatively charged or positively charged which can cause it to change chemically, it can like break molecules up or provide enough energy for molecules to form and our DNA is made out of molecules and they're randomly changing.
MAKO: Yeah that's bad.
SQEAKY: All these 5G technologies, they exist over frequencies that we've already known-
MAKO: Radio waves.
SQEAKY: -don't cause this kind of problem. Yeah.
MAKO: Yeah they're they're in the non-ionizing radiation territory.
SQEAKY: There's a big range of 5G frequencies.
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: But the ones people freak out about, at least that I've heard people freak out about, have been the ones that line up with microwaves, and WiFi, and cordless phones- not cell phones, when I say cordless phones I... something old people have, all you zoomers. It's actual phone with no phone. It's still attached to your house so it's kinda dumb but it was the peak of tech back in the 80s.
*Mako snorts*
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: No? You disagree?
MAKO: I mean you're not wrong.
SQEAKY: Yeah but all these things use the same frequencies so if it was gonna do whatever these things were claiming it was gonna do, we'd be having these problems for the past forty years.
MAKO: Well so what I read on Wiki doesn't entirely agree with that.
SQEAKY: Really?
MAKO: Yeah. The... Okay so, 5G has a very large range of frequencies that it can operate at and a lot of the stuff that's being rolled out right now is largely at or close to these ranges, yes.
SQEAKY: Okay.
MAKO: But going forward and even with a few exceptions already, they're pushing it into higher ranges. So it's- yeah, it's not all quite the same as these things but the spec for 5G says it can go as high as fifty-four gigahertz which is much larger than the frequencies that you were talking about before. But still, this isn't- The threshold between ionizing radiation and non-ionizing radiation is the upper end of visible light.
SQEAKY: So we're talking about all these waves that are in the same frequencies as WiFi, radar, microwaves, TV transmissions, UHF, VHF, all these different frequencies-
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: -and these things are all on one side of the visible light spectrum. You have to get to the other side of visible light and I guess visible light too, but none of these are in the ionizing space where scientists say is the harmful stuff.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Yeah.
MAKO: So we don't wanna say that it is impossible to be harmed by radio waves or microwaves, you absolutely can be harmed by these things but not in a direct ionizing radiation destroying your DNA sort of way.
SQEAKY: Which is what a lot of the claims are.
MAKO: The way that these things do harm people are usually related to heat.
SQEAKY: Yeah microwaves and infrared are both great ways to translate heat to something. That's why we cook food in the microwave.
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: Or at least if you're bad at cooking and kind of American about the whole mac and cheese thing. Sorry I'm trying to appeal to our foreign listeners, we actually got a whole bunch of downloads in Germany and France over the past couple weeks.
MAKO: Ah.
SQEAKY: So I figure if we just mock American cooking and praise the bratwurst and French food we can get more then? No?
MAKO: I mean praising bratwurst is pretty easy, it's very very praise-worthy. Not gonna lie.
*Sqeaky holds it together*
MAKO: We have a German shop here in Omaha that like I kinda wanna go visit now.
SQEAKY: Edelweiss?
MAKO: Maybe. I don't know. I was introduced to it through former roommate.
SQEAKY: Okay. Now I feel kinda bad about being a vegetarian. I do kind of a miss bratwurst.
MAKO: A little bit yeah.
SQEAKY: We should piss off all of our German listeners by cooking a bratwurst in the microwave.
MAKO: Why would you do this?
SQEAKY: Spite.
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: I don't have a good reason.
MAKO: I don't agree with you but that is a coherent response to my question.
*Sqeaky loses it*
SQEAKY: I will not be ruining anyone's ethnic food with a microwave.
MAKO: Okay. Anyway, back to the thing. There have been multiple studies and a lot of experience about radio waves and their various applications and their effect on human health. There are adverse effects in some cases like if you are standing right next to a ground station where they're transmitting microwaves from a satellite and you're just standing there all day, that's going to cause some problems.
SQEAKY: And just make you warm.
MAKO: I'm pretty sure I've heard... I don't have a source for this.
SQEAKY: I kinda wanna cite Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. I just re-listened to his Death Ray episode and he specifically talked about repurposing microwave satellites in an attempt to cause damage to things...
SOURCE [37:24] Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, Death Rays - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pN220NlE8Y
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: And all of the designs that scientists have put forward have opted for a big large transmitter array in space that would broadcast microwaves down and that the receiving antenna would be a large thing that you would put over a city because they like to scatter a lot. Just as they hit the atmosphere the water and things will redirect them.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: So having a small little antenna like we do for our like Dish TV or our Starlink internet y'know just isn't practical because so much of the beam loses focus so you'd put like a big ass antenna over like a farmer's field or over a couple city blocks and if it does get misaligned it'd be such a small portion of energy that it wouldn't do anything other than warm the people there even then only by a few degrees but I suppose then if you have one of the really tightly focused ones and you point it at one motherfucker and you just blast him with all of the sun's energy you could cause that guy problems.
MAKO: So when I say problems I don't mean like 'the dude was incinerated'.
SQEAKY: Yeah yeah a death ray would incinerate a dude, yeah.
MAKO: I mean, yeah. Yeah. That's...
SQEAKY: I have to go get that episode and cite it now dammit.
*Sqeaky types*
MAKO: But from what I vaguely recall hearing a while ago some dude would just be working near some of these things and just developed splitting headaches and he had no idea why and I suppose a sufficient amount of heat could cause that depending on other medical issues the person may have but anyway so-
SQEAKY: Okay I got it.
MAKO: So I don't wanna say that like there's no way that somebody can be harmed by these things but we got a pretty good idea of the ways that somebody could be harmed by these things and we have a pretty good idea that these things are pretty safe. Uh, despite that there are ongoing studies that are happening, one of which is a study being conducted by a World Health Organization, and they will have a completed report published sometime in 2022.
SOURCE [39:08] Radiation: 5G mobile networks and health - https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-5g-mobile-networks-and-health
SQEAKY: We're pretty much expecting a big nothingburger from this, right?
MAKO: We have no reason to believe that they're gonna be like 'Oh wait, actually 5G is dangerous' yeah no we're not expecting that at all.
SQEAKY: So this is just a report to placate the masses and to give more...
MAKO: Personally I think even if you feel like a certain result is likely you still need to do your due diligence and that's how I want to look at this but yeah we're not expecting anything out of it.
SQEAKY: Yeah. Okay. If it does come out with some other thing I suppose we'd want to dig into it in that future episode but you said summer next year?
MAKO: Uh, well, when we publish this episode it will be 2022 and they didn't-
SQEAKY: Oh.
MAKO: -specify when, they just sometime in 2022.
SQEAKY: Oh okay. So, when they put out with their report, if it disagrees with what we're saying this episode we'll touch back on it and issue some corrections.
MAKO: Absolutely.
SQEAKY: Okay. Well, what about some other worldwide death-causing dysevidentia problems? Maybe something changing slowly over time and causing tornadoes last episode?
MAKO: Oh. You mean kinda like a change in the climate? Like a climate change?
SQEAKY: Yeah. Yeah that one.
MAKO: Ah okay.
SQEAKY: Yeah.
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: We feel this is relevant to the topic of dysevidentia because...
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: Certain political elements here in the US are still denying the existence of climate change when we have things like cold snaps in Texas freezing people to death. That was last year so not really counting it here.
MAKO: Last two years, actually.
SQEAKY: Oh it happened twice?
MAKO: Yeah the polar vortex. I mean it wasn't as bad the year before as it was last year-
SQEAKY: Oh okay okay.
MAKO: -but it still happened two years.
SQEAKY: But the tornadoes. There's no way to say that those tornadoes that happened in December- for our international listeners, tornado season is in the spring and fall.
MAKO: Yeah. You need high humidity and about eighty-five degree weather for the start of ideal conditions for tornadoes and that doesn't happen in December.
SQEAKY: And ideally you need that to meet up with another body of air that's like dry and cool and you need those two things to hit each other which is why you see each other in Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, right not not where all these tornadoes hit. These tornadoes went right over the Appelachian mountains which usually have pretty steady December climate.
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: So we can't definitely say that that was climate change. That's not how it works. Climate change is a statistical problem.
MAKO: Mhm.
SQEAKY: Which is why I went out and found this study by Monash University that is attributing five million deaths to climate change. Caveats, these deaths aren't all in 2021. They're from 2000 to 2019 but the paper was released in June 2021.
SOURCE [41:29] Monash University released a study this year attributing 5 million deaths to climate change -https://www.monash.edu/medicine/news/latest/2021-articles/worlds-largest-study-of-global-climate-related-mortality-links-5-million-deaths-a-year-to-abnormal-temperatures
MAKO: Ooh a technicality. Nice.
SQEAKY: I'll take it. They also didnt' try to track a lot of the common causes that people like to say are deaths to climate change so they didn't try to go off specific weather events. People like to say that big hurricanes are enhanced by climate change. When Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern seaboard of the U.S. a lot of people were saying it because it was huge and they were more numerous but you can't say any specific storm is down to climate change because we just don't have the ability to make an experiments that's controlled and uncontrolled with climate change it's- that's just not good science. But some things we can do are predict things that we understand really well like temperature and see where temperatures have changed in an egregious way and then count just deaths for that and I'll link to the Monash University paper and then The Lancet which is a peer-reviewed science journal and you can both see the nice pretty graphics and charts and they're right up with how they did this and I made sure to read that and understand it well enough that I probably couldn't do it myself but I get what they're doing. The math is really straightforward and simple for me a software developer who did math professional for twenty years, maybe that's not the best example?
SOURCE [42:25] The lancet publishcation of the climate study - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
MAKO: But didn't you always say that you're a programmer why should anyone expect you to do math?
SQEAKY: Well I add one and subtract one and make the computer do it again and again and again and I see how I can make a computer do this math.
MAKO: Okay. So you're really, really good at adding and subtracting one?
SQEAKY: Yes. That's all of my skills.
MAKO: Okay. I just want to make that clear for the audience, that's all.
SQEAKY: I just do it billions of times a second, okay?
MAKO: You don't do that, you tell something else to do it.
SQEAKY: Stop taking my credit.
MAKO: I'm not taking your credit, the machine is.
*Sqeaky blubbers*
SQEAKY: But it wouldn't do it without me. Alright, well anyway. This thing is really straight forward. They predicted what the temperature would've been like, what the temperature actually was, and what the amount of deaths actually would've been and what they actually were. And they were able to lump all of these deaths into one or two categories. Extra deaths from heat, extra deaths from cold.
MAKO: That well... You got a good yin and yang thing going there. I guess.
SQEAKY: And not surprisingly, they were able to for this twenty year period say 'Hiya here's where there's extra deaths' and we actually got a few thousand here in the US and a bunch of that was from cold but most places there was extra deaths from cold. It turns out that kills people way more reliably than extra heat.
MAKO: Yeah just talking about the polar vortex from Texas, we know that the polar vortex caused all sorts of secondary effects that killed people like knocking out electricity means that-
SQEAKY: Anyone who's relying on electricity to live dies.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Yeah. If that knocks out your like freezer and you have no food or it prevents your car from charging and you can't get to town for medicine or...
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: ...if you're on a ventilator.
MAKO: Yeah ventilators are pretty directly related, yeah. Yeah. So there's secondary effects there that we know killed people in Texas.
SQEAKY: There were millions who died from cold in Asia and Africa and they pulled China out from the rest of Asia 'cause China's a special case in a lot of ways but just about a million died of cold in China, and just under a million, if I recall it was 850,000 something like that, died in total in Europe. So Europe and the US are getting off really light on this climate change death thing. I mean except the tornadoes and hurricanes but we had those already so.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: We got used to it. Just for reference this paper was funded and supported by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. I'm not gonna say those groups are apolitical, but they're at least not playing politics in the U.S. or Europe where are listeners are largely concentrated so I think they're nice and neutral for us and none of their... none of their academic workings seemed to be based in bullshit the way I teased apart that paper promoting the correlation of video games and violence earlier.
MAKO: Yep, yep.
SQEAKY: And hey if you feel guilty about that, we have a sponsor!
MAKO: Oh for god sakes.
*Sqeaky laughs*
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: No Wren, you can offset your carbon emissions. Just click the link in the show notes. God this is so self-serving, I feel terrible.
SPONSOR [45:26] Wren, offset your Carbon emissions - https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=1701593&u=3056050&m=105790&urllink=&afftrack=
MAKO: Don't feel terrible. It is what it is.
SQEAKY: Okay then, sign up for Wren they'll fund all sorts of carbon capture projects like planting trees and helping displaced refugees not emit carbon. Okay let's move on this is terrible.
MAKO: Okay, yeah.
SQEAKY: I gathered some sources on white supremacy- I gathered a source on white supremacy possibly killing you.
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: But we also have Kyle Rittenhouse. That whole thing happened this year.
MAKO: Yup.
SQEAKY: And that killed two people.
MAKO: Two people. Injured a third.
SQEAKY: Yeah he probably wouldn't have brought a gun to a protest if not for white supremacy.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Yeah, so.
MAKO: Even if it wasn't white supremacy directly it unquestionably was secondary effects of white supremacy caused him to bring a gun.
SQEAKY: There's a huge overlap of white supremicists and second amendment rights activists.
*Sqeaky sighs*
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: Why do these things have to be entangled? There are hypothetically good ways to approach the second amendment and second amendments activists use none of them. Anyway. We have a link in the show notes to uh AP News, there's a veteran who after serving in the military was contacted by the FBI and asked to infiltrate the KKK and he did. For something like ten years he attended meetings, gathered notes, gathered identifying information about KKK members, and he stopped two different plots to kill people of color.
SOURCE [46:31] man infiltrates the KKK - https://apnews.com/article/florida-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-veterans-ku-klux-klan-fa0ec4120b1457f56c527108074795b5
MAKO: Oh my god.
SQEAKY: So he was wearing a wire, he was recording what people were saying, and he got to know these people for ten solid years. Yeah. And then the FBI relocated him, gave him a new name, gave him a fake history, did the whole witness protection thing because he went to trial and spoke against these people and they've actually if you read in the article, they tracked him down through witness protection and he's been approached by members of the KKK and threatened and has felt it necessary to carry a gun with him at all times and to install motion-sensitive cameras on his house so he's really damaged his life and prospects going forward and made real enemies so white supremacy hasn't killed this guy yet but it just might.
MAKO: Yeah that sucks.
SQEAKY: Yeah. He also put forward personal testimony. I normally don't value that very highly but for somebody who's in a very unique position and an expert on the KKK, he put forward a personal testimony to us and documented and gave that to the FBI, active attempts by white supremecist groups to infiltrate various police organizations at different levels: local, federal, city, and government agencies. So, they're organized, they're trying to gain political power any way they can. Yeah. That's not very cheery.
MAKO: No, no. I mean we're not here to be cheery but.
SQEAKY: We can't make jokes about anything?
MAKO: We can make jokes it's just how tasteless do we want to be? We don't wanna be a tasteless.
SQEAKY: Well what if this next set of deaths come in six delicious flavors including camomile and lemon?
*Mako laughs*
MAKO: I mean as long as it's flavorful death I guess.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: So I'm sure plenty of our listeners have already heard about how an essential oil spray made by Better Home & Gardens and sold exclusively at Walmart was determined to be the cause of six infections and a death. We will use WebMD as a source and... Sorry I'm just trying to assemble my thoughts on this 'cause it's so ridiculous. Homeopathy is normally harmless because it's 'Let's dilute some chemical until there's nothing left and give people water and let people heal on their own.
SOURCE [48:25] Essential Oil spray contained deadly bacteria - https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20211023/walmart-recalls-spray-deadly-bacteria
SOURCE [48:25] 2 other deaths investigated in essential oil recall- https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2021/10/22/recall-alert-walmart-pulls-essential-oil-spray-two-deaths-investigated/
MAKO: Yep.
SQEAKY: Essential oils was a variation on this where you took the smelly bit of something, diluted it a whole bunch until there was nothing except maybe the smell, it turns out if you just put a whole bunch of water and a tiny bit of nutrients plenty of bacteria can live in that.
MAKO: That kind of makes sense, yeah.
SQEAKY: And this one bacteria, Burkholderia pseudomallei. I don't know if that's how it's pronounced but various scientific papers have described it as causing a necrotizing pneumonia. Going to link to that, Science Direct.
SOURCE [48:59] Papers about Burkholderia pseudomallei - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/burkholderia-pseudomallei
MAKO: Necrotizing.
SQEAKY: Yeah it eats your lungs and your lungs die.
MAKO: Okay.
SQEAKY: So it kills you slowly and horribly over the course of several days.
MAKO: Lovely.
SQEAKY: One paper described it as quote "Potential biowarfare or bioterrorism agents."
MAKO: That's pretty bad.
SQEAKY: Yeah. So you just go pick that up at Walmart.
MAKO: Yep. For all your bioterrorism needs look to Walmart.
SQEAKY: Yeah it was linked to six infections across Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, FLorida, I guess in the cold it didn't fare as well further up north. But they recalled all of it, there were 3900 bottles that were in stock at various stores and they've been pulled. If you still have some of this by some weird quirk of fate, the CDC is not recommending you dump it or handle it, just throw it in multiple bags, like ziploc bags, put it in a box clearly label it, bring it back to Walmart, Walmart will both accept your return and give you a twenty dollar gift card, and anything that's been touched by it just disinfect with regular household cleaners, Lysol or just whatever spray you have that kills germs. If it says it kills germs it kills this. And then if you have any cloth wash it and dry it completely in a heated dryer, that usually kills this. And if you've used it in the past month and feel really sick, go to the doctor 'cause this killed one in six people who got sick with it and catching it early is the best way to survive. He just sneezed, I'm not sure if the microwave picked it up.
MAKO: Probably. I don't know.
SQEAKY: Have you been spraying essential oils?
MAKO: Uh... I... Not to your knowledge.
SQEAKY: Do I need to go to a doctor?!
MAKO: No you're fine. It's fine. It's fine, it's fine.
SQEAKY: You protest quite a bit.
MAKO: It's fine.
SQEAKY: Next you're going to tell me I have to worry about quicksand or other jungle hazards.
MAKO: Are you going to the jungle?
SQEAKY: No, but all of the media of my childhood, countless stories, TV shows, convinced me quicksand would be part of my adult life.
MAKO: Okay. Um, I do remember as a childhood thinking like 'Oh if I ever find myself in quicksand this is good information to know' but uh yeah I didn't have the same takeaway from that stuff.
SQEAKY: So you're saying that jungle hazards just aren't a problem for anybody?
MAKO: I wouldn't go that far.
*Mako sighs*
MAKO: Yes, yes...
SQEAKY: You're not taking the segue. C'mon man, c'mon!
MAKO: I just- Oh god. Fine. So, I mean yeah, if you're venturing into the jungle or anything vaguely jungle-like you need to be mindful of the threats and dangers that are around you that are in the environment you are cohabitating with. For example, if you go out on a lake, I mean it's helpful to understand what kind of fish may be in that lake.
SQEAKY: Like the Lochness Monster.
MAKO: Sure. Sure. If the Lochness Monster were not a hoax then yeah, okay, it would be helpful to know that the body of water you are deciding to go out on and do some casual fishing in is being shared with the Lochness Monster and that might be dangerous 'cause it may decide it wants to eat you or even if it doesn't want to eat you maybe it destroys your boat, maybe you're not as strong of a swimmer as you thought. These are things to be mindful of.
SQEAKY: I like the implication that all that we need to defend ourselves against Nessie is a life preserver.
MAKO: I mean... Well unless Nessie decides to eat you.
SQEAKY: Maybe Nessie's repelled by bright orange.
MAKO: I- Maybe.
SQEAKY: Sorry.
MAKO: Maybe Nessie's repelled by non-believers I don't fuckin' know.
SQEAKY: That's astoundingly coherent holy shit.
*Sqeaky and Mako laugh*
SQEAKY: Explains why none of those scientists found her. But yeah you were bringing up jungle hazards not Ireland hazards.
MAKO: Yeah yeah yeah. So, on October 31st of this year, there was a man and two friends. The one man in particular, thirty years old, they went out fishing on a lake and-
SQEAKY: In Brazil, right?
MAKO: In Brazil, yes.
SQEAKY: Okay.
MAKO: And some bees ended up swarming them and they freaked out.
SQEAKY: That's problematic.
MAKO: Yeah. Different people have different takes on bees, some people are just y'know naturally afraid of bees, they fear getting stung, other people are a bit more mellow about it, some people are reasonably afraid of bees because they have allergies for example.
SQEAKY: Makes sense, okay.
MAKO: I don't know which one applies here. What I do know is all three people jumped out of the boat into the water in order to flee the swarm of bees.
SQEAKY: Anywhere but Brazil that sounds like a reasonable idea. Or maybe Ireland. Double check for Nessie.
MAKO: I'm sure there's dangerous things in a lot of waters. North America may be a little less so but even then still 'cause I mean if you're just diving into the water in the Everglades to escape bees-
SQEAKY: Crocodiles.
MAKO: That's dangerous.
SQEAKY: Okay, I see, I see.
MAKO: Yeah. The waters here in particular were infested with piranhas.
SOURCE [53:29] Man eaten by piranhas after jumping into lake to escape bees - https://au.news.yahoo.com/man-eaten-by-piranhas-after-jumping-into-lake-to-escape-bees-084441642.html
SQEAKY: Mmm. That'll get ya. Fuck.
MAKO: One of them specifically it literally did. He was attacked by piranhas, he died, they recovered his body later. The other two friends, they swam to shore as fast as they could and they made it to shore without any injuries.
SQEAKY: Well I'm glad two people got away from this. This is- That's really unfortunate, what the fuck!
MAKO: Yeah. So, that's really weird because this is the type of extreme circumstance that you'd normally here in like as a punchline to something. Like you're running away from bees and then you're attacked by piranhas.
SQEAKY: It's like what the- How the fuck did they report on this?! What's your source?
MAKO: Uh Yahoo News apparently.
SQEAKY: The headline is literally "Man eaten by piranhas after jumping into lake to escape bees."
MAKO: That's a pretty solid no bullshit headline. Like that's exactly what you'd get out of that article.
SQEAKY: Yeah and they've got this ridic- not ridiculous but they have this very intimidating picture of a piranha just like staring at the camera trying to bite it. Okay that's uh... Damn. Damn.
MAKO: Yeah. Okay, so other unusual deaths 'cause there are unusual deaths that are happening all the time and I'm sure I can come up with more but we're just gonna cover a few that were easy to find.
SQEAKY: Is this one related to dysevidentia?
MAKO: I would say a bit kinda yeah maybe.
SQEAKY, laughing: A bit maybe kinda?
MAKO: So there there's some details, there's some nuance, there's ways that you can interpret this. In some interpretation, absolutely. In another interpretation not so much. So anyway, to the story. This one was in India, twenty-five year old man. He wanted to have sex with a partner and he did not have a condom on hand.
SQEAKY: Okay so they just did some heavy petting, maybe some mouth stuff. Okay. Fine.
MAKO: No. They absolutely wanted to have penetrative intercourse. But they absolutely did not want to do it without condoms. Or they wanted to do something-
SQEAKY: So they're safety conscious, okay.
MAKO: Very, very. They knew that doing it without some sort of contraceptive was off the table, but they also knew that sex was definitely happening.
SQEAKY: So... they got clever? They did something- Did they went to the store, they bought some condoms?
MAKO: Uh god... That would've been so much better. No, the guy instead decided to use epoxy resin on himself to seal himself up.
SQEAKY: The dude glued his dickhole? Holy-
MAKO: That's another way to put it, yeah.
SQEAKY: Holy shit. He glued his dick up like all over, just the tip, what?!
MAKO: The report did not elaborate on the amount of epoxy resin that was used just that it was used. And uh, then they proceeded to have sex.
SQEAKY: Okay so it wasn't a total failure.
MAKO: Well in the immediate context it sounds like it worked.
SQEAKY: Okay. So then it's safe for me to epoxy my dick?
MAKO: Absolutely not.
SQEAKY: Oh.
MAKO: Don't do that. Like, just just don't do that. So it raises some questions as to how you get the epoxy off of yourself after all of this happens but he didn't even get that far. So he was found dead the next day.
SQEAKY: Oh shit.
MAKO: Yeah. He went to sleep and the details as to whether or not the epoxy was still on him is again unclear, yeah he was found dead the very next day. The authorities stated that the contraceptive caused multiple organ failure, exactly how you get multiple organ failure from epoxy on your junk is a bit beyond me. I'm not a doctor, maybe a doctor could tell me. But I don't understand how these things connect, but nevertheless the authorities reported it --and this is the part where you can start making some inferences-- they did say that the couple had a history of drug abuse and were under the effects of drugs that night.
SQEAKY: Oh, okay. So he probably just died from drugs with epoxy on his dick?
MAKO: There is that sentiment, yes. The family is trying to demand that a more thorough investigation takes place because they believe the drugs played a larger role than the contraception.
SQEAKY: So if I don't do drugs and just put epoxy on my dick I'm probably fine?
MAKO: I still don't recommend it but maybe? I'm not sufficiently an expert to make that call.
*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*
SQEAKY: Well surely this story can't get any more weird?
MAKO: So that story specifically it... not so much, that's about everything but for some weird reason this source decided to share a second story-
SQEAKY: What?
MAKO: -that was not covered in the headline.
SQEAKY: Okay.
MAKO: 'Cause they're like hey yeah this was really weird, also this other thing was really weird. And they're not wrong. So they say that a man died after revenge-biting a baby snake.
SQEAKY: I'm sorry- Revenge-biting?
MAKO: Yes.
SQEAKY: Like he bit the snake back?
MAKO: So-
SQEAKY: Doesn't that leave him close enough to get bitten by the snake like on the mouth or some shit?
MAKO: Uh literally yes.
SQEAKY: What?!
MAKO: So the story goes that he was bit by a snake, presumably out in his yard or something I don't know-
SQEAKY: But in India. Like they have cobras there.
MAKO: Well they didn't clarify if this was in India. I don't know where this happened.
SQEAKY: Okay.
MAKO: Just-
SQEAKY: Okay.
MAKO: But it happened somewhere. The snake is indeed venomous, and uh so he got bit, presumably out in his yard or something like that, he recovered from a bite somehow, and he was angry enough about this that he went out, captured the snake, brought it in, and just grabbed a hold of it and bit into it 'cause he was like 'Fuck you I'm gonna bite you back I'm apex pers-' I don't fuckin' know I'm not gonna try and get too into this mental state.
SQEAKY: Yeah don't get into the mental state of dysevidentia sufferers. Don't bite snakes, not a good idea. And it might not even be dysevidentia, he might have been affected by whatever the snake venom was, maybe it was a neurotoxin, right?
MAKO: Maybe, I don't know.
SQEAKY: If you're suffering from neurotoxins you might not be thinking clearly.
MAKO: So exactly as you said earlier, when you bite into a snake, you- especially one that has not had anything done to it to render it unconscious, uh yeah yeah it's pretty much in prime striking distance to your face.
SQEAKY: Ah god.
MAKO: He was bit on the face by this venomous snake more than ten times.
SQEAKY: Oh well that'll do it.
MAKO: Yeah. It did.
SQEAKY: Wow. Okay. So I didn't expect to learn that this episode but I now have a moral I can take away from this: Don't bite snakes without restraining them. I've learned something. Thank you very much.
MAKO: Just taking revenge on wildlife maybe that's uh, not a really good thing to do in the first place.
SQEAKY: But I have a feeling if like I bite a squirrel right, I'm gonna have better results than that.
MAKO: Sure. But I mean, better results. But like-
SQEAKY: It's still useless.
MAKO: It's an animal, the fuck you think you're doing with revenge? I don't know, I think Herman Melville has some words on this?
SQEAKY: Was the snake white and sinking his boat?
MAKO: Uh probably not sinking his boat. White? I don't know. It wasn't in the report.
*Sqeaky sighs*
SQEAKY: God- You went full Moby Dick. Okay okay but surely there's nothing else animal related that's gonna be just ridiculous and causing deaths this year.
MAKO: Uh well... Okay, okay, okay. I got one more. I mean I-
SQEAKY: Oh this one better be good.
MAKO: There's more than one more but we'll- one more, just one more. So, this one happened in uh Catalina, Spain. There is a statue of a stegosaurus.
SOURCE [1:00:25] The Body of a Missing Man Was Found Inside a Stegosaurus Statue - https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dp5k/spain-dinosaur-statue-the-body-of-a-missing-man-was-found-inside-a-stegosaurus-statue
SQEAKY: I guess that counts. It's animal-like. It's a statue of an animal, okay.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: An extinct animal but still.
MAKO: Yeah, yeah. So uh apparently it is a paper mache statue and there was a father-son group that like noticed an unusual smell and so they did some investigating and they found somebody inside one of the legs of this paper mache statue. And so they went to get help and contacted the authorities, the authorities came over, recovered the body, and the person was already dead. The way that he was in there, it looked like he tried to reach after something that was at the bottom of the statue’s foot on the inside, and the first thought people had was oh he was probably reaching for like a phone or something that he dropped. After they recovered the body, they did in fact confirm there was a cellular phone at the bottom of the statue's foot so it seems that somehow he lost his phone in the leg of the statue, went in head-first after it, got himself stuck, and managed to stay there for over a day, unable to get help, where he died.
SQEAKY: The fuck-
MAKO: So- We're talking about unusual deaths here and I mean somebody getting stuck somewhere and dying as a result of it, that type of thing happens often enough but it still kinda gets an honorary mention because it was inside the leg of a stegosaurus statue.
SQEAKY: Yeah it's not epoxy dick but that was pretty ridiculous. I feel for this guy, it sucks that he got stuck inside a stegosaurus and died, and the irony of being just a little ways from your phone to be able to call for help.
MAKO: Ugh... That's gotta suck a lot.
SQEAKY: Do we know how long he was in there?
MAKO: Over a day.
SQEAKY: Sounds like he was deprived of air somehow. Maybe his body was physically blocking the air and he just thought he was gonna be fine if somebody noticed him.
MAKO: Or maybe he fell down enough there was enough compression on his ability to breathe, I don't know. The article didn't really go into detail as to the exact mechanisms of his death. Didn't even say exactly how long he was in there, just more than a day.
SQEAKY: Goodness. Okay so that's totally ridiculous, I feel for most of these people. I mean some of these people brought it on themselves, some of these people are dumping it on others. Fuck Kevin Sorbo.
MAKO: Yeah.
SQEAKY: Trying to get people killed. It's so easy to get killed. Believing true things will help prevent that most of the time and other times you just get attacked by bees and piranha infested waters.
MAKO: Yup.
SQEAKY: Totally not his fault.
MAKO: No.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: Smashing sound.
SQEAKY: Smashing sound?
MAKO: Fuck.
*Guitar riff*
MAKO: Thanks to Qeldaar for video and graphics work and thanks to AlphaWolf294 for transcription.
SQEAKY: Thanks to our new Patreon supporter, Rachelle Walters.
MAKO: Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters. Our supporters at the Evidence Investigator level or higher include Jarod, DuktTape, Qeldaar, Steven Larabee, and Kaiju Halina.
SQEAKY: Thanks for listening and don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review or tell a friend.
MAKO: If you aren't sure where to do that you can read the show notes, transcripts, and listen online at dysevidentia.com.
SQEAKY: Support us financially at patreon.com/dysevidentia.
MAKO: And talk to us on our subreddit at r/dysevidentia.
SQEAKY: Tweet at us @dysevidentia or you can chat with us or watch our podcast on our Discord server or on YouTube, links in the show notes.
MAKO: Or you can email us at contact@dysevidentia.com.
SQEAKY: Copyright 2021, BlackTopp Studios, Inc.
MAKO: Intro music was Slow by Pit X. Used with permission.