*Guitar riff*

MAKO: This show contains adult themes and language including many believing that millions deserved to be drowned to death.

SQEAKY: Dysevidentia is an inability to reliably process evidence and this is a podcast all about it.

MAKO: This episode was released on October 13th, 2021 and we are discussing dysevidentia because it is clear millions of biblical literalists are suffering from it.

SQEAKY: I am Sqeaky.

MAKO: And I am Mako.

SQEAKY: We discuss logic and evidence because we understand buoyancy at a third-grade level.

MAKO: You can support us by becoming a patron at patreon.com/dysevidentia.

SQEAKY: If you built a one-to-one scale model of the ark, it sank, and you are waiting for the flood insurance payout and are tight on money right now, 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’re going to discuss COVID for just a minute…

MAKO: ...and why the biblical flood didn’t happen.

SQEAKY: But first, I'm going on a rant.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: You went with third grade.

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: They actually teach it, I have a fucking source!

SOURCE [1:20] Buoyancy is often taught to 1st grader but we said 3rd to make the insult sound more plausible and therefore more insulting: https://www.brighthubeducation.com/lesson-plans-grades-1-2/129311-first-grade-summer-science-what-floats/

MAKO: I- Fine.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: My SO had a financial thing with her family. They wanted to transfer some payment for her thing from them to me- fine. I pay for all kinds of stuff anyway, one more isn't a big deal. The problem popped up when they wanted to meet in person to share paperwork. These people are anti vaxxers and anti maskers and in general a hazard to themselves and others. I am an asshole so I gleefully insist that they be vaccinated or mail it. They are careless and won't care about COVID until it kills someone they know. And it won't be anyone I know if I can help it. My SO caves to her family's demands often. Because they are bigger assholes than me and she wants to make everyone happy. She was willing to meet them in person until I reminded her that the last time they met they promised social distancing and hugged her against her will anyway. They promise all kinds of stuff and then never live up to the promises. No reason to believe them this time. She was texting and arguing with them. It's her time. She can do what she wants with it. But she kept coming to me seek approval on compromises. She would ask and I would point out the blunt reality of dealing with her family. "What if they promise to social distance?" Well, that didn't work last time. "What if we just meet at the place where we turn in the paperwork?" That happened last time and they lied to you. "What if we time it to reduce exposure?" Why would we have any reason to expect them to abide by any rules? These people are already insistent on not vaccinating and insisting on not wearing masks like whiny children. They're absolutely not willing to compromise and are unwilling to even entertain the idea of wearing masks. They only have power to negotiate because my SO gave them power. She did this by entertaining compromise with them. They're already using all of the power they have to choose harmful and terrible things. If they give COVID to me or my SO, which can happen despite us being vaccinated, either of us might give it to my medically frail grandmother. We would almost certainly be fine and she would not. They are choosing to be whiny little bitches and put my family at risk for their perceived convenience which is illogical nonsense and has no basis in evidence. Why should we compromise with people who are acting to harm us? People who are entirely unwilling to compromise. We even gave them the option to mail it if they really don't wanna vaccinate. This argument was bothering me and my SO. She wanted to make everybody happy. But I wasn't going to be happy with needless risk to my family and her family without exposing us to needless risk. She was freaking out, I was getting fed up, so after a few hours I did something wildly inappropriate. I called my SO's mother on the phone and I asked her name to make sure I got the right person. She confirmed it was her. Then I said "Get vaccinated you whiny little bitch," and she promptly hung up. After some brief insults over text from their family saying that my SO needed to "leash her dog" and similar useless drivel, they caved and agreed to mail the paperwork. Hours of arguing terminated swiftly by making it clear there would be no compromise. Sometime later her brother threatened me with a gun via a text message to her. Coward. He has my phone number. He could call or text me but did neither. Like the lot of them, they want to talk to someone they think they can control. This has been reported to the police but I'm sure nothing will come of it because he is a flabby coward. Sure, I was an asshole, and there might have been some more diplomatic solution, but at the same time we can't tolerate or compromise with people who are willfully wrong. They have seen all the evidence as anyone else has. We shouldn't compromise when the evidence is this clear and in this case, when it was clear to the anti vaxxers that their stance was in the way, they gave up. These people are even welcome back in my house, once they show proof of vaccination and I get a written apology about the death threat.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Hey, that came across clean.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: I didn't feel any mouth noises. I'm sure I said plenty.

MAKO: Mmm, probably, maybe. I dunno, we'll find out.

*Mako imitates artillery fire*

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Remember last episode how we were celebrating that we didn't fuck anything up in episode sixteen?

MAKO: And I corrected you saying "that we were aware of."

SQEAKY: Oh I believed you. Later on that day one of our listeners, an HVAC expert, contacted us to let us know one such place where we fucked up.

MAKO: Ah.

SQEAKY: I'll be sure to invite them over to the Discord and we'll see if we can get them tagged as an HVAC in case we have any more specific questions but I kind of offhandedly said that we should be checking our HVAC systems and trying to upgrade to y'know, filter out stuff.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: So normal HVAC filters per this person and per reading and per the EPA --I've got a source I'll link in the show notes-- just doesn't work like that. Like, I kinda knew that it wouldn't stop viruses entirely but apparently it's often just not worth it at all. And even the EPA says only to do it af- or to upgrade to those filters after you've done every other safety precaution like social distancing, masks, and vaccinating.

SOURCE [6:13] EPA on using HVAC filter - https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/air-cleaners-hvac-filters-and-coronavirus-covid-19

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Let me see, I've got some specific details here. If anyone is trying to sell you a bipolar ionizing filter, that's pretty much just bullshit. Just skip that, there's no evidence supporting it. It might even make harmful shit like ozone. There's a bunch of people selling UV lights that you stick in your vents to like clean the air. If you look at how hospitals do it they have machines that make UV light and they leave it in the room for like a long-ass time, and that works, because you exposed the virus for a long-ass time.

MAKO: Yeah. UV lights as far as I know are also used to uh, treat municipal water supplies.

SQEAKY: Totally! I mean- I meant I don't know first hand but that makes sense. You have to shine the light at it for a while. You can't just stick the light in the vent and then blow the light past the bulb and expect it to actually kill the stuff.

MAKO: It just doesn't instantly vaporize.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: It's gotta be slowly cooked.

SQEAKY: Bet we could crank that up. I bet if the UV light were so intense it were melting your vent it would kill the germs.

MAKO: You are probably correct, but you have other problems.

SQEAKY: Not for long.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: Also technically correct.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Per this HVAC expert, if you do get the filters that can stop the viruses, uh- So you can get filters that are good enough to just stop viruses, or you can get the ones that will just catch the water droplets but either way they clog much faster and a clogged filter isn't doing any good for you. So you have to change your filters very often. And also how good is the ventilation in the area? You have to ask how often does your HVAC recirculate your air in the room?

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: So if it only changes out the air once every half hour, you're not really doing a lot because the virus doesn't last very long outside your body anyway so there's... He just points out that it's not the right way to attack the virus. If you've already done everything else and have a ton of surplus money and lots of willingness to change filters, great. Otherwise-

MAKO: It can get you that extra five percent boost on top of everything else.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: If that.

SQEAKY: One environment he said in theory work very well is airplanes because they're constantly recirculating the air-

MAKO: Oh yeah.

SQEAKY: -and it's a closed environment.

MAKO: The last time I was actually on uh... an airplane they said they recirculate the entire cabin air every two minutes.

SQEAKY: Yeah! See that would really be good. Corrections from last episode. So I stumbled across another science podcast, the Unbiased Science Podcast, and they actually had an episode about Baricitinib, which we didn't know how to pronounce last episode.

SOURCE [8:19] Baricitinib is a real medicine and here are some other treatments - https://www.unbiasedscipod.com/episodes/covid-19-can-we-treat-it-treat-it-no-one-wants-to-be-defeated

MAKO: Mmm.

SQEAKY: So the pairing that our guest --and if you haven't listened to that interview it's emotionally harrowing, go listen to it in episode seventeen-- and uh, he describes that his grandmother was put on Baricitinib combined with some kind of steroid, and apparently that whole idea of combining uncommonly used drugs together was assembled by some machine learning experts and they wrote some AIs that just tried to simulate and guess what drugs would be good to mix and match and they gave their proposals to scientists who tested it. We're still not sure why, but Baricitinib does combine with the medicines he described, and it does take the edge off. It's, y'know, it's not gonna save you a hundred percent of the time, but if you had a seventy percent chance making it this might move you up to a seventy-five percent chance making it so statistically measurable, we're not sure why but it's empiric and real.

SOURCE [9:06] Last episode we had an emotional interview with someone who lost someone to covid - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/0017-disecting-misinformation

MAKO: Neat.

SQEAKY: Alright.

MAKO: And say fucking AI.

SQEAKY: Aw yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we don't know why it works, but we have like this pile of mathematical formulas- the AI knows how it works! But it's a big pile of linear algebra that if we want to go in- What we're doing is reverse-engineering how this thing knows what it knows, so fucking AI. It's a black fucken box, nobody knows what's inside. Not even the people that wrote it. It knows what it's doing!

MAKO: Does it though?

SQEAKY: I mean it gets the right answers.

MAKO: Sometimes you get the right answers and you don't know what you're doing.

SQEAKY: Hmm, well, as a counterpoint this episode will be recorded correctly.

*Sqeaky and Mako laugh*

MAKO: Uhuh...

SQEAKY: What's this button do?

*Sqeaky pushes the button like a dumbass*

SQEAKY: Didn't fuck up the episode.

MAKO: Yet.

SQEAKY: Wait. Did it?

MAKO: Oh god.

SQEAKY: We have to re-record.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: Alright. The last thing we got wrong. Uh, we said that there were four hundred people in Trump's audience. That was just wrong.

SOURCE [9:56] only 100 to 200 in trump crowd - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-capitol-high-alert-pro-trump-demonstrators-converge-rally-2021-09-18/

SQEAKY: For the-

MAKO: Apparently only-

SQEAKY: For the-

MAKO: one hundred to two hundred?

SQEAKY: Yeah. The DC rally was way smaller. Some news outlets were saying that there were more police- and there were. There were also more reporters there than Trump supporters. The Trump supporters made up less than a third of the crowd because they were outnumbered by police or reporters on their own.

MAKO: Well that's embarrassing.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Now, we can't take that to mean that Trump supporters aren't dangerous, just that they didn't show up to raid the Capitol again.

MAKO: That's fortunate.

SQEAKY: There's still tons of Trump loyalists trying to do things like- I don't want to say rig elections, but to try and influence elections by changing how boundaries are drawn, putting loyalists in positions where they could potentially fuck with elections in the future... There's still a threat to democracy, but they don't know how to make a rally in DC anymore.

MAKO: Mhm.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: And maybe their experts can explain to you-

SQEAKY: It's too ridiculous, you can't say it!

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: What's going on in COVID?

MAKO: Uh, a few things. COVID news is slowing down a little bit but I mean we're still in a pandemic so there's always going to be something.

SQEAKY: There's always people spreading misinformation about it.

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: I guess I'll bring up the nursing shortage.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: There's uh... a ton of reports of nurses quitting. Now, the common story about people quitting that I've seen the past two weeks has been over the vaccine mandates.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Lo-

MAKO: Allegedly a bunch of healthcare workers are upset and really that's... that doesn't seem to be the case. I mean there's a number of them but.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Every single source I've seen shows that every place firing people is firing less than half a percent of their workforce. And like fuck those people. They shoulda got vaccinated.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I'm talking about a real issue people aren't talking enough about. Nurses being stressed because of how ridiculously difficult it is to be a healthcare worker during the pandemic.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Yeah. There are hospitals saying that they have a quote "chronic nurse short staffing". Tons of testimonials about people quitting, tons of depression, tons of people contemplating suicide. It's actually horrible and it actually is getting people killed.

MAKO: Yeah. The- This actually was something that was brought up and then not talked about nearly enough and then disappeared from the discourse around this time last year actually. Uh, wha- for the Alpha spiking for the holidays and Delta being here in force, it kinda makes sense that history would repeat itself a bit.

SQEAKY: I can't imagine what it's like to be one of the healthcare workers in either Alaska or Idaho right now. Are you familiar?

SOURCE [12:20] Alaska also has crisis standards of care - https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2021/09/22/alaska-activates-crisis-standards-of-care-for-entire-state-to-help-covid-overwhelmed-hospitals/

SOURCE [12:20] Idaho and the crisis standard of care is one example of a stressor on health care workers - https://www.mtexpress.com/news/coronavirus_covid-19_info/as-covid-19-numbers-stay-high-crisis-standards-kept-in-place/article_600318b4-27bf-11ec-9b43-0ba76e5738cd.html

MAKO: Mm-mmm.

SQEAKY: Both states have gone to what they're calling emergency standards of care where they are prioritizing based on whether or not people can survive instead of providing adequate healthcare for everyone. The hospital systems throughout all of southern Alaska --so not the rural parts way up north-- and all of Idaho are totally swamped.

MAKO: That's alarming.

SQEAKY: I just can't imagine working there and seeing someone come in with like a heart attack and saying "Yeah I could help you or I could give out, y'know, doses of steroids to a bunch of these who are having just a little trouble breathing on COVID, sorry heart attack victim you're done. We just don't have time for you."

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And that's exactly the kind of shit that's going on and has been for a while up there.

MAKO: Yeah. When you have finite healthcare resources and you have a bunch of people who... I don't want to say deliberately, but are making decisions that force those resources to be stretched thin, you have to start talking about rationing.

SQEAKY: Well, their choice to not take the very basic step of getting vaccinated is the problem.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I mean, Idaho has one of the worst vaccination rates in the country, so they're gonna get it worse. And then Washington, which has an average- I think, but they have a better-than-Idaho vaccination rate, they're suffering. There's a ton of overflow from Coeur d'Alene, a small city in Idaho, that's near Spokane, a small city in Washington, where people are going from Idaho to Washington --and it's like a sixty or seventy mile drive-- to get into a hospital so they can like realistically get medicine and get treatment and not push out people who can't be moved like heart attack victims. It's ridiculous. I dunno, maybe I'm following this one because I used to live in Spokane.

SOURCE [13:50] Idaho has 48% vaccination rate and the national rate is 58%, Idaho is the second worst state - https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/

MAKO: That is... That is an alarming thing.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: And...

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: Hopefully it doesn't happen to too many more locations in the United States, but I dunno, some states seem to want that kind of thing.

SQEAKY: Well, if everyone who can get vaccinated just would, we wouldn't have this problem. That by itself is enough.

MAKO: Yeah, not at all.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I'm kind of astounded that we here in Omaha aren't in some sort of emergency standard of care. Didn't we have a horrible rate?

MAKO: Oh yeah. We've had- I don't know what the current numbers are, but uh every now and again in the Omaha subreddit, we will have healthcare professionals post their numbers for the hospital system here, and we've had a few alarming rises in bed occupancy, but we've... we've gotten really close to being maxed out but we've never actually been maxed out yet 'cause every single time the healthcare workforce- and we do- healthcare is a big industry here- they will be- tell everybody "Hey, stop doing the stupid thing. You might be the person to die if you like keep doing this." And every time healthcare professionals have like really aggressively stressed that, our population seems to respond.

SQEAKY: Well that's nice. So I'm really glad we do have a fairly robust set of hospitals and healthcare things here in Omaha. So we have some of those level four containment centers. We brought a few people with ebola here a few years ago didn't we?

MAKO: Yes. During the uh... Doctors Without Borders trying to handle the ebola outbreak in Africa. We did fly a few of those people into our containment facility.

SQEAKY: Yes, let's take ebola straight into the center of our country.

MAKO: If it works it works.

SQEAKY: It did work. We got it.

MAKO: Yeah. And those- The people that were put into that care facility recovered.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Didn't they do something like with an antibody treatment here? Some really weird thing?

MAKO: Yeah. I don't remember the details but they did something special for it.

SQEAKY: M'kay. Uh, what else about special treatments? Uh... you got a source here? Oh- uh, I cited a source for the inquirer and we'll get some sources with the actual numbers for Idaho and- But we have a source here from CNBC describing what Mako's got.

MAKO: So Merck recently announced that they're COVID-19 pill is going onto another stage of its development and may be market-ready soon. This pill is an antiviral kinda similar to uh... was it Ramdesivir, is that how it's pronounced?

SQEAKY: Yeah Remdesivir.

MAKO: Okay. It's an antiviral similar to Remdesivir, but Remdesivir kind of accidentally kinda works as a treatment for COVID-19.

SQEAKY: Yeah it was used for other viruses and we just tested it because it was a general purpose antiviral.

MAKO: Yeah. But this one they're naming Molnupiravir. Molnupiravir.

SOURCE [16:29] Merck Covid-19 Pill is good news - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/merck-covid-pill-who-says-antiviral-is-good-news-as-it-awaits-data.html

SQEAKY: That sounds like Thor's hammer for smashing viruses.

MAKO: A little bit I suppose it does.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: But anyway, yeah. It is a targeted drug engineered to work against COVID-19 and it being a pill that is an antiviral it can be taken after the infection begins to help treat a bunch of symptoms. And early data says that it decreases the risk of hospitalization or death in adults with mild or moderate cases by fifty percent.

SQEAKY: Wow.

MAKO: Yeah. The vaccine is still more effective for preventing these things, of course. But, for people who are unvaccinated or people who are having cases of COVID-19 despite the vaccination, this can go a long way to help save their lives.

SQEAKY: I have to imagine that someone who's... who has a breakthrough case of COVID and then gets this, they're gonna be in a really good place compared to an unvaccinated person who doesn't have access to this.

MAKO: Definitely.

SQEAKY: Okay. Molnupiravir. Sorry, just goofy.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: And then uh... We got some details wrong describing booster shots and we were just sloppy with our terminology. Um, Sean, the same person we interviewed for the ethics episode, episode ten, he's a Cognitive Psychologist and he just happened to be up on the terminology here so he corrected us. But he's saying quote "Booster shots for Pfizer were recently recommended for people sixty-five years or older, people who are eighteen or older and have underlying medical conditions, people who are eighteen and older and work in high-risk settings, or people who are eighteen or older and live in high-risk settings." And that pretty much can cover anyone who is vaccinated with the Pfizer shot six months ago and uh... like functions in society. If you have the ability to lock yourself in a basement it doesn't really cover you, but pretty much anybody else. If you work in healthcare, if you work in any publicly exposed setting where you just see lots of people. And there's a list even that the CDC has up, it's like they specifically call out grocery store as high risk, people in the postal service, people in education staff. Anybody who might actually get COVID, they're available... They are eligible.

SOURCE [18:37] Our interview with Cognitive Psychologist Sean Toppi in episode 10 - https://dysevidentia.transistor.fm/episodes/hard-to-joke-about-ethics

SOURCE [18:37] Additional Doses from booster shots and you can read about that from the FDA - https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-authorizes-additional-vaccine-dose-certain-immunocompromised

SOURCE [18:37] "Booster shots" for Pfizer were recently recommended for: 18+ who live in high-risk settings - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/booster-shot.html#HighRisk

SOURCE [18:37] "Booster shots" for Pfizer were recently recommended for: 18+ who have underlying medical conditions - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/people-with-medical-conditions.html

SQEAKY: That's the word. They are eligible to get the uh... the booster shot. And then additional doses, meaning a third shot for both Pfizer and Moderna is recommended for people who need certain criteria specifically being immunocompromised, so like cancer survivors and stuff like that.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: So I guess the difference between a booster shot and an additional dose is still a little bit lost on me. I mean they're both ways to increase your chances and maximize the efficacy of vaccination but there is a distinction on who gets onto what list and what can happen and whether or not the dose is a duplicate of the second and first shot or if it is something slightly different, so there are details and definitely speak to a doctor.

MAKO: Mhm, yep. Nothing official has come down as far as I understand but the Johnson & Johnson boosters are not too far behind.

SQEAKY: That's good. That'll hit the staff of this podcast.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Did we all get the J&J?

MAKO: Uh... no, one of us got the Pfizer, but everyone else got the J&J.

SQEAKY: I wish we could all like as a society be making fun of each other for which vaccine we got rather than talking about people dying.

MAKO: Yup.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I so want to trash talk those Pfizer people.

MAKO: I mean, you still can.

SQEAKY: No I can't. There's people freakin' dying from not being vaccinated. Agh, whatever. Uh... When Sean Toppi sent in this correction he gave us a ton of links and resources, I'll be sure to include them. A lot of it is information from the CDC and FDA and it really does explain the difference between an additional dose and a booster shot and who's eligible for what and when. I'll make sure all of that is available in the show notes.

MAKO: Good information.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Hey Mako, check out this simulation I made.

*Splashing sound*

MAKO: What the fuck? Why did you throw your computer into the bath.

SQEAKY: Two reasons.

MAKO: Two?

SQEAKY: It has one of the artificial stupidities that escaped.

MAKO: No no no no no no. No. That was taken care of and it was left in your care... I- Okay, I think I see the problem now.

SQEAKY: This was the last one that wasn't contained.

MAKO: Woah woah. There were others?

SQEAKY: The other one outsmarted me and locked itself in my bedroom.

*Thumping noises as something breaks*

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: I'm gonna have to Old Yeller it, aren't I? But I suppose the flood simulation explains all the GI Joe figures and rubber ducks.

SQEAKY: And the little boat. See? No way an ark could've survived.

MAKO: Yes, Sqeaky. Noah's Ark couldn't have survived God dropping a giant gaming computer hundreds of times its mass onto it.

SQEAKY: Oh... I need to get a new one, won't I?

MAKO: You better contact ABK Kustomz again.

SQEAKY: Getting new computers can be expensive. I'm glad we can use code "evidence" for ten percent off.

SPONSOR [21:05] Get a custom computer, use code evidence for 10% off - https://abk-kustomz.com

MAKO: And maybe their experts can explain to you to not throw your computer into a bathtub.

SQEAKY: The experts at abk-kustomz.com are pretty sharp. I'm glad they're there to help with every computer sold.

MAKO: Couldn't you have just written some flood simulation software?

SQEAKY: Yeah... But this seemed easier, and the software wouldn't have had the rubber ducks.

*Rubber duck squeaks*

*Sqeaky chuckles like a child and sighs*

MAKO: I hope you're happy.

SQEAKY: Yes, I am.

MAKO: Fine.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: So, everyone came here to get wet.

MAKO: Wow. Yeah, kinda.

SQEAKY: I mean, everytime people listen to your voice.

MAKO: That's what I have been hearing.

*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*

SQEAKY: This is technically a workplace. If we actually get any patreon supporters... Wait, so if we get patreon supporters you can sue me for sexual harassment.

MAKO: I suppose I technically could.

SQEAKY: You heard it guys. Go to patreon.com/dysevidentia. Yeah, make us get paid enough so Mako can sue me.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: More seriously, you wanted to discuss and approach this whole biblical flood thing...

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: From two angles.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: I guess maybe we should discuss why. We've both had recent encounters with flood believers.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Alright so we're gonna go over three things. We're gonna discuss why we're discussing this, then we're gonna go over some of the history, then we're gonna discuss some of the contradictions with science and common rebuttals that...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: ...apologists make.

MAKO: We landed on this topic because we both have had recent interactions with people that have tried to tell us to some extent or another that the biblical flood happened or there was some evidence of a global flood which is just...

SQEAKY: Bullshit.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: It's... it's...

MAKO: It's not accurate.

SQEAKY: It's just patently wrong. And not only is there no evidence for it, there isn't even good evidence for like regional floods. And unlike most religious things, where you kinda have to be an expert to refute this, there are like fifteen different ways to refute this that are trivially easy so any sixth-grader should be able to figure it out.

MAKO: Mhm. Most of the people that are going to be listening to this are going to be familiar with specifically Noah's Ark and the Book of Genesis and that whole tale of the worldwide flood. That God created a global flood in order to wash away all of the impurities of humanity 'cause we had sinned too much. And then created rainbows as a sign of the pact to never do this again.

*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*

SQEAKY: I wish I could say anything half that funny.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: No, it's just the different groups of Christianity take so many different takes on this. Some of them say it's an allegory, some of them say it was a local flood, some of them actually teach children that literal bullshit you just said in school like it's serious and true.

MAKO: Well that particular line is something I do remember from when I was younger but on top of that it was something that I read while researching this. So...

SQEAKY: Great.

MAKO: ...regrettably that is a real thing, that is taught if that is surprising to any that is listening, I assure you that it is.

SQEAKY: To all of you Europeans who are listening, all eighteen percent of our podcast listeners, we're not kidding. I had heard that one growing up. I wasn't taught that one as the literal truth, but I had classmates in my elementary school that had been taught that rainbows were part of the pact with God where he wouldn't- they were proof that he wouldn't flood the world. Uh sorry, the people we met...

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: You interacted with someone?

MAKO: Yeah. They... they didn't really get too in detail with it because they are... They are someone I'm a little bit more comfortable being blunt with so when they started saying "Oh yeah there's evidence of a global flood" I just pretty much immediately shut that down like no, you're wrong, just no. I mean there's some evidence to support regional floods and we'll cover those in a little bit but they're not rock solid evidence.

SQEAKY: Yeah. I just ran into people on social media. Somehow I got people I think on Twitter and LinkedIn yelling at me at the same time about it, so I dunno. If you go deep enough on the internet you can find people who believe anything is true.

MAKO: Yeah, regrettably.

SQEAKY: Onto the history?

MAKO: So, a lot of people who believe these things believe that the Bible is the first account of the global flood and uh... archeology has some words about that particular assertion. Near as we can tell, the book of Genesis that contains the flood of the global flood story, that was written sometime around 6th century BC.

SQEAKY: So like 2600 years ago?

MAKO: Yeah, roughly.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Uh, so... It was around there, and there were... there's a lot of similarities between it and a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh to the point where a lot of archeologists believe that the Epic of Gilgamesh is directly inspired... uh the Noah's Ark story in the Book of Genesis. And that was estimated to have been written around seven hundred BC.

SQEAKY: So 2700 years ago or about a hundred years earlier.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And then much earlier than that the Epic of Gilgamesh appears to have been based on the... This is another one of those things I'm pro-

SQEAKY: The Entrahasus?

MAKO: I was actually going to try and pronounce the first word before that.

SQEAKY: Oh.

MAKO: The Akkadian Atra-Hasis.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Yeah, okay, sure, we'll go with that. Pronounce it-

SQEAKY: Every time I've heard someone say "Akkadian" it's Akkadian.

MAKO: Okay. I mean maybe they're all wrong- I don't know. I'm bad at pronunciations.

SQEAKY: What I'll do is I'll modulate your voice so that you come across mispronounced no matter how correctly you get it.

MAKO: Oh... Well how thoughtful of you.

SQEAKY: You're welcome.

MAKO: Fuck you.

SQEAKY: Eh.

MAKO: So, anyway, yeah, the Akkadian Atra-Hasis has a number of other similarities for- that's in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Noah's Ark story. That one is dated roughly 1800 BC.

SQEAKY: So 3800 years ago.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And there's details in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atra-Hasis that both seem to come from the Sumerian creation myth. And this is where kinda like the dates I was able to find that are a little bit confusing. 'Cause it says that is dated at 1600 BC which is after the Atra-Hasis, but I'm assuming that that's just the... the general dating of the tablets that these stories were found on.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Yeah but the dating of the tablets that these things were found on was- is probably what's being referenced by the materials that I found that described these things rather than the actual origin of the stories themselves.

SQEAKY: So it's the difference between a copyright date in a book and the day the story was first written. Like Disney's Cinderella is gonna be copyright twentieth century but the Cinderella story might be like Grim Fairies Tale 1800 or something.

MAKO: Something like that.

SQEAKY: Okay, that makes sense.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So the tablet might be newer but recounting an older story.

MAKO: Yeah. Based on the details that are covered and the parts of the story that are expressed, how they are expressed, and just the style of the writing, yeah it definitely seems that the Atra-Harsis and the Epic of Gilgamesh both were inspired directly by the Sumerian creation myth. And the Epic of Gilgamesh also borrowed a little bit from the Atra-Harsis. But the Book of Genesis largely borrowed from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

SQEAKY: So we have this chain of here's where the flood stories came from and only one step in that chain, the newest step in that chain is Christians.

MAKO: Yep.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: To be clear though, this is just creating a chain of likely inspirations but if we're talking about the number of mythologies out there that contain flood myths it's actually most major religions. There is a flood myth in almost all of them.

SOURCE [28:34] Flood Myths - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Mythologies

SQEAKY: It's almost like people set up societies near bodies of water, and it's almost as if farm land that floods on occasion is more likely to produce good crops.

MAKO: Yes there is this exposure to water. That's not quite the same as like devastating floods.

SQEAKY: Oh I don't know. I just- I'm unaware of any place people have lived where... where floods simply don't happen. I mean, there were floods in ancient China, floods in ancient India, floods in ancient y'know freakin' Germany.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Just everybody gets floods.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah. So I mean if a flood wipes out half a town you're gonna write it down. It doesn't take too long for a story to be inflated. It makes perfect sense to me.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Now I don't have good evidence for all of that, but you've traced back one story to y'know, a creation myth that then got put in the Bible. You even have the word cre- Sumerian creation myth.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Is what you're claiming the Bible cited for it's- It's so good. Sorry.

MAKO: Near as we can tell, yes.

SQEAKY: What about- Since I'm... I'm postulating that there were just various floods in the areas. Do we have any examples of actual floods happening?

MAKO: Uh so... This was harder to find really good information on 'cause like most of the sources that I was able to find... I wanted to try to like get to the original source and when I would occasionally find the original source it would be behind a paywall and like "Guys, stop it with the paywalls." Uh, but-

SQEAKY: When you say paywalls you mean it would be like an academic journal-

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: -that talked about- Oh okay.

MAKO: Yes. Academic journals. So, they're specifically in the area of Mesopotamia. There have been sediment layers that have been found at uh, particular archaeological dig sites that do indicate that a significant amount of water was in the area during a certain period of time. So that does suggest flooding, but then it starts becoming a little bit head scratching when you realize that this city-state has the evidence of a significant flood, but a different city-state twenty-three kilometers away doesn't have that same layer.

SQEAKY: So you're saying there's geological evidence for floods on a city-wide scale. Like there could be a flood that, y'know, would've been devastating to Omaha but would've left Kansas city alone.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah, that makes sense.

MAKO: Except on a smaller scale. Only twenty-three kilometers.

SQEAKY: Yeah it just- Can you imagine any of our listeners know of a second city in Nebraska?

MAKO: Do suburbs count?

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY: No. Bellview is the only other city in Nebraska on the river. And whenever you say Bellview people are like "Talking about Bedmon, Washington?" Gah. Do we have a European example? I can't think of two cities... Dresden is on the Elbe uh... No, I'm done.

MAKO: Yeah. I don't know.

SQEAKY: Ah. The Nile. There gotta be... And Cairo is all I've got.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: Nevermind.

MAKO: Good job. A for effort though. Okay. So yeah, it's not like there's just one archaeological dig site that has this. And they even said that the significance of it, there was a clay layer that was I think three-point-seven meters thick at one point-

SQEAKY: That's a hell of a flood.

MAKO: Exactly. That's- They were like holy crap. That's also the same one that twenty-three kilometers away it didn't exist at the other site so they're like okay what's going on here. There's a catastrophic amount of water at specifically this location that didn't affect this other nearby location.

SQEAKY: Well, so just a couple of years ago when we had the big winter storm and we had that freeze thaw freeze cycle that tore up our streets really bad.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: At two-hundred-and-fortieth-street- for those not familiar with Omaha geography... Should be all of you. Don't come here, it's boring. But every twelve miles you count on the numbered streets, you get another mile from the river, so two-hundred-fortieth-street is just twenty miles from the river, it was completely demolished. Like, there were bridges taken out, chunks of ice on the road that weighed a ton --literally a ton--, roads that were underwater for a week or more, but then you go up to a hundred-and-fiftieth-street, y'know five miles away or whatever, and no damage. Nothing was wrong with the road. They were like a pothole 'cause some water got into a crack and froze. That was the damage. And you go further in and there's, y'know, water that might've been knee high in some places but then right by the river, no damage. So yeah, localized flooding happens. Sorry, I'm not tryna contradict you or anything, I'm just- It isn't astounding to me. If you then go and write a story that said it covered the whole world because your whole world is one tiny town, that's a matter of your crappy perspective, not-

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: It just bothers me that people take this seriously, sorry. You were saying?

*Mako laughs*

MAKO: Yeah, okay. Clearly, again, yeah there's no global flooding. But, there still is- when we say a localized... I mean, something that-

SQEAKY: I get that there's multiple scales for local, yeah.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: You could mean flooding uh... Like the whole Missouri River Basin versus flooding a town. Those are both local, they're just- Y'know one's half a continent, the other's a town.

MAKO: That's a little bit of an extreme definition of local but you're technically correct.

SQEAKY: I dunno.

MAKO: But yeah. There are other archeological sites that had sediment layers that were different, uh... but they existed and they do suggest some flooding but they're not quite all dated at around the same time. So the idea that a singular flood- I mean you would have to- they would have to prove that there are some... that there are some errors with how they were dated in order to try and argue that they do coincide with one another. And, even then, this really only applies to the Mesopotamia region. So yeah like, do the notion that- 'Cause like if there was a global flood there would be a sediment layer like this that would just be all over the world.

SQEAKY: Kinda like the K-T Boundary where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit.

SOURCE [34:07] K-T Boundary - https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/

MAKO: Yeah. But that's not really present in the geological record so not global. We're talking about regional flooding over a large area, something that might affect multiple city-states. Something that would be pervasive across the culture at large. There are a few theories that have been put forth to try to explain this. They all suffer from problems. There's a little bit of physical evidence at a minimum for each of these three, there is also some physical evidence against it for each of these three, some of these are shakier than others. But, they are actual scientific hypotheses that have been brought up that haven't been completely ruled out yet, and that's probably one of the more positive things that I can say about them. But-

SQEAKY: So you're really even attacking the idea of large-scale regional flooding.

MAKO: I wouldn't say I'm attacking it. One of them in particular I think is... interesting. I like it. Uh... that'll be the third one I cover. The first two I think are a little... mmm.

SQEAKY: Okay, okay. So everytime people brought up local flooding I just... I kinda gave it a pass 'cause I thought people meant on the scale of a single city and I really hadn't considered these medium-sized floods. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. You should-

MAKO: Yeah. So one of them that has been brought up is the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis. This is simply trying to state that the Black Sea has grown in size considerably- Well, okay, if you look it up Before and After Map you might not think it's considerable but for anyone who was living on the edge of the Black Sea before it grew, yeah it's considerable. And it grew because of the melting of glaciers. Uh, sea level- Sea levels were rising as a result of all of the ice that was melting as well as interior basins- just lake water levels were rising and the Black Sea was no exception. Now-

SOURCE [35:53] Wikipedia on Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

SQEAKY: Should these prehistoric people simply have pulled back on their carbon emissions? Maybe mined fewer gigatons of oil per day?

MAKO: Definitely.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: That- That would have helped a lot. No, seriously, the- Depending on exactly how glaciers go about melting you can have a glacier form inside a basin itself and that just creates a lake that later the uh... perimeter wall for lack of a... a better term of the glacier, that melts and that woul- could create what is called an outbreak flood where you are just dumping huge amounts of water into another lower basin.

SQEAKY: So just to reiterate- ask just to make sure I'm clear on this. This Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis is putting forward the idea there was a large glacier and the sum amount of the inside of the glacier melted first, whether that be the inside like a candy bar or the inside like a bowl melted then the wall of the bowl or the perimeter of the candy bar broke, dumping just a total fuckload of water onto the Black Sea.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So that would result in a flood that like took place over just a couple days and permanently changed its borders.

MAKO: Uh... Well maybe not a couple of days, probably closer to like weeks and months given the volume of water, uh but they... This supposedly actually came from multiple sources, those being one of them.

SQEAKY: What are some of the other possible sources?

MAKO: Uh... Having sea level rise in the Mediterranean Sea and having that spill over other geological features.

SQEAKY: Oh, okay. So the Mediterranean could have risen and then receded and just- Okay.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah yeah yeah, I get it, it's complex but there's multiple sources for water. Okay.

MAKO: Yeah. But in either of these cases, the Black Sea, it grew. And any settlements that were on the edge of that body of water before it started to grow would be flooded and permanently wiped out.

SQEAKY: Yeah you're lookin' at me like I should have some question for these people being wiped the fuck out.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY: No, a flood wiping them out makes perfect fucken sense.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Yeah, a giant glacier broke and the glacier's larger than what I think the world is and a wall of water hit my town. I'm wiped out now. That makes sense.

MAKO: That is the hypothesis. Uh, the problem with some of these hypotheses- The people have done other... Like okay, I'm a little bit hazy on the details here regrettably uh but people have done additional analysis on what they expect the water levels to be and the water levels do not appear to be nearly as extreme of a... of a difference from basin to basin as the initial hypothesis put for, so it looks like it was a little bit less of a deluge and more of a... kind of a a slow seeping in so it wasn't something that would be necessarily a catastrophic for flood for people as it is just kind of like "Oh hey, let's move back a little bit this year."

SOURCE [38:43] Regrettably paywalled but talks about the merits and flaws of the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618206001984

SQEAKY: So less of a Black Sea deluge and more of a Black Sea moistening.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So yeah, additional analysis made by other researchers seems to come to that conclusion more consistently. That's one of the big problems with the... the Black Sea deluge.

SQEAKY: So on the topic of the Black Sea....

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: ...and the idea that Noah's Flood story came from various people around the Black Sea responding to a natural event. It's kinda shot down looking at it unless one very small group of scientists is right..

MAKO: Yeah, and there's also the part of the story where the water ends up receding. The Black Sea didn't receed.

SQEAKY: Ah, yeah, okay, I see. I suppose though if you're on a boat and you float towards the edge you might think it's receding, I don't know.

MAKO: Yeah, it's possible. Another one. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. This is a hypothesis that is- that tries to explain the Younger Dryas boundary layer that occurs in a number of locations. Basic idea is they believe that a meteor or a comet broke apart and then scattered to multiple locations around the globe.

SOURCE [39:52] Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis

SQEAKY: Alright, so to make sure I'm getting what you're saying.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: There's a name for a geological layer-

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: -for people not familiar, as water drops rocks onto the bottom of seabeds and riverbeds and things, we get sediments building up- or even on dry land if you get layers of vegetation dying it forms layers of soil which get compacted into rocks or whatever, you're saying that an asteroid or rock or something from space broke into pieces and layed down a layer in multiple places.

MAKO: That is the hypothesis, yes.

SQEAKY: Okay and the name of that is Younger Dryas layer?

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Okay I'm with you.

MAKO: Okay, so it depositing peak concentrations of platinum, high temperature spherules, melt glass, nanodiamonds... That's a lot of fancy stuff.

SQEAKY: A lot of stuff you don't want to breathe.

MAKO: Yeah. It triggered extensive biomass burning, a brief impact winter, and some abrupt climate change. So this is- How this ties into the flood myth is that presumably one of these fragments hit some body of water creating a... a flood of some kind but this theory- no, not theory. This hypothesis actually suffers a number of problems. It is definitely the weakest hypothesis of everything that all three that I'm gonna be mentioning here. And just- So some of the sites, they tried to... when they proposed the hypothesis, say that "Okay we went to this site and we found these particular materials and it's similar to these other locations so we're gonna try to make a cohesive hypothesis to explain all these things. The probl- In my opinion, the biggest problem with this hypothesis is that when researchers went to these locations, they weren't able to reproduce these materials at those locations.

SQEAKY: So the layers were different different places. Maybe there isn't a single Younger Dryas layer.

MAKO: Well, the same place, different researchers found different things.

SQEAKY: Oh.

MAKO: Yeah...

SQEAKY: That speaks of bad measurements or something.

MAKO: Yeah, yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: So that's definitely a significant problem with the hypothesis but...

SQEAKY, humored: Not having evidence is a significant problem. Yeah, yeah.

*Sqeaky chuckles*

MAKO: Well, I mean, allegedly people had the evidence but the evidence isn't reproducible so it's like okay well hold on what's going on here. And yeah, so there there's other things, we have a Wiki link for this and the Wiki has sections for like five different ways for the evidence that the evidence for this hypothesis has been disputed. It's definitely a really weak hypothesis but it's one of them that technically still has some small amount of scientific legitimacy. It's not completely been struck down. The third one- and this is the one that I like the most. I can't say that it's strong yet, more analysis needs to be taken and it is difficult to analyze because of its location but in the Indian ocean there's something called the Burckle Crater and it is estimated to be about 5,000 years old and it has a lot of the characteristics including geological formations and crystals that are known to be associated with meteor impact sites. And at a depth of 12,000 feet in the Indian ocean.

SOURCE [42:54] Burckle Crater - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burckle_Crater

SQEAKY: The fuck? Like, two-and-a-half miles down?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Can we get that in science units instead of freedom units?

MAKO: Uh, 3800 meters.

SQEAKY: Well that makes it clear to all the non-Americans out there and now I don't know how deep that is, I forgot.

*Mako and Sqeaky laugh*

MAKO: 12,500 feet.

SQEAKY: Can I get that in a useful unit like football stadiums?

MAKO: No.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: You say a useful unit and then immediately say something that isn't useful? C'mon.

SQEAKY: Piranha per cow per minute [PPCPM].

MAKO: Moving on. More analysis does need to be conducted on this crater. But if we were to assume that it is in fact an impact site, then it- something at that depth with that much energy to create those kinds of geological formations is definitely something that could easily create tsunamis through the entire Indian ocean coastline.

SOURCE [43:41] Did a comet cause the great flood? - https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/did-a-comet-cause-the-great-flood

SQEAKY: That'll give you a flood myth right there.

MAKO: Very much so. That will flood the whole Mesopotamia region and the water would eventually recede.

SQEAKY: So you're saying it hit in the Indian ocean which would mean it would have to go up the Red Sea or Persian Gulf to get to Mesopotamia. It would have to go around either side of, y'know, the Arabian Peninsula. Huh, I guess it would- physics would permit that.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: We're also talking about totally trashing whatever prehistoric societies were living in Bangladesh or India...

MAKO: India has its own flood myth.

SQEAKY: It does?

MAKO: Mhm!

SQEAKY: Lots of places have flood myths, oh okay. So this- so this regional story lines up now what are some of the problems with this story?

MAKO: Uh...

SQEAKY: This hypothesis.

MAKO: It's just- it's very very new.

SQEAKY: Oh. So we haven't had time to gather lots of evidence yet.

MAKO: Yeah. So one of the things that was used to indicate that there... There was definitely tsunamis that originated from this crater was the appearance of a chevron, which is a geological formation in the sand. Looks kinda like a... like a wedge or a "V".

SOURCE [44:40] Impact craters as sources of mega-tsunami generated chevron dunes - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284318503_Impact_craters_as_sources_of_mega-tsunami_generated_chevron_dunes

SOURCE [44:40] "Chevrons" are not mega-tsunami deposit: A sedimentologic assessment - http://faculty.washington.edu/jbourgeo/BourgeoisWeiss2009final.pdf

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: And those are associated with tsunamis from impacts. And the initial researcher, Dallas Abbott, claims to have found a bunch of chevrons in the Indian ocean coastline that indicate that... more or less all point to that crater. But another researcher came along and was like okay hold on, you're making a presumption here, chevrons don't actually say what you are claiming they say. So some of this evidence... it needs more analysis.

SQEAKY: Okay so, there's some people saying some things a little bit irresponsibly, but there's no direct contradictions in refutation of the core idea. 'Cause we definitely have a large piece of physical evidence. The crater and the math all fits for this flooding the world at some point.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: One thing that does refute the asteroid... the Burckle Crater asteroid...

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: ...is again the sediment layers that are inconsistent in the Mesopotamia region.

SQEAKY: Oh, yeah.

MAKO: And elsewhere. Like... yeah. There would need to be some explanation for that and currently there is none.

SQEAKY: Okay, so maybe it flooded around the Indian ocean and didn't go that deep inland.

MAKO: Maybe.

SQEAKY: Okay. So-

MAKO: It is a possibility.

SQEAKY: Okay so, regional floods are plausible- 'cause we could also discover a new crater somewhere. We could discover a new crater in the Black Sea.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: That would explain this whole Mesopotamia regional flood that we read about in the Bible if that's how we want to try to interpret that. But worldwide flood still-

MAKO: Oh it's definitely not a worldwide flood.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Okay, so you looked for floods. Lets- Is that everything you wanted to say about the idea of a regional flood?

MAKO: Eh... For realistic flood scenarios that physics actually permits, yeah that was pretty much what I wanted to cover. Oh, um, a lot of the publications for the Burckle Crater are dated 2008, 2009, or 2017.

SQEAKY: So that's pretty fresh.

MAKO: Very fresh.

SQEAKY: Considering a 5,000 year old crater and we have sources that are twelve years old at the oldest. Yeah that's fresh. We should go over your sources real quick.

MAKO: This is gonna be grossly out of order.

SQEAKY: Okay so your sources on Burckle Crater. You've got a few sources for Wikipedia providing overview for flood myth and mythologies for the Black Sea deluge. You've got ScienceDirect-

MAKO: It specifically talks about the merits and flaws of the Black Sea deluge hypothesis.

SQEAKY: Okay, that's a scientific paper? Okay.

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: Uh, you've got some more Wikipedia describing Berckle Crater and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis and both of those cite tons of sources.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Okay. You've also got Discover Magazine-

MAKO: That talks more about the Burckle Crater.

SQEAKY: Yeah and specifically the article "Did a Comet Cause the Great Flood?"

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Uh, what are these last two?

MAKO: They are... uh scientific papers made by people talking about the possibil- specifically the chevrons.

SQEAKY: Okay.

MAKO: Like the first one is the original researcher trying to claim that the chevrons demonstrate that it is a tsunami from an asteroid impact. The second one is another researcher saying no, it's not.

SQEAKY: Okay, so, all good sources. Fantastic. And that will let us see the controversy that actually exists in science. Okay, how about how... How about we just go over the idea of a worldwide flood just doesn't match reality.

MAKO: There are many ways it does not match reality.

SQEAKY: So, in my experience, when people bring up the Noah's Ark story or other biblical type floods, it's almost always some person who's actively trying to defend a religious belief and usually specifically in opposition to evolution, sometimes specifically in opposition to macroevolution.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: 'Cause they try to use evolution- microevolution to defend the ark story. It's great. The mental gymnastics are amazing. And unfortunately, so many of these defenses that the apologists use boil down to an argument of "God did it" and I don't know that these people are intentionally trying to shut down the argument, but when you bring up an unfalsifiable belief and say that you're unwilling to change your mind unless you get evidence but there's no possible evidence that could change your mind, they're kinda just shutting down the argument. It's-

MAKO: Yeah there's no conversation at that point.

SQEAKY: Yeah, so, I'm sure this will become more clear when we get onto the first one, but it's still useful to try and plant the seed of doubt if you are in a position where one of these people will believe you, or if you have some emotional connection with somebody, y'know plant these seeds of doubt and then move on. There's no set of facts that you can give to a biblical literalist that will actually change their mind because in their mind God is perfect and right and any set of facts you provide is going to be a test from Satan or something, so-

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: You gotta give them the facts and then see how those facts are never again contradicted their whole freakin' life, or at least for a few years, and then maybe their mind will slowly change. Okay, so just going through this. For building the ark. It's simply too big to be made out of wood. One of the few things in this story that lots of Christians agree on is the size of the Ark. In the Bible it's measured in cubits and there's actually some pretty specific numbers given, but what is a cubit, how is it actually identified, different amounts give us different numbers, but a huge amount of people agree on four-hundred-and-fifty feet or about a hundred-and-forty-meters long. Which is actually really tiny for a wooden ship. I'm sorry. It's really huge for a wooden ship, it's tiny for a modern ship.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Plenty of modern ships just dwarf that. But when you look at the next largest wooden ships, right... I'll include a link on Wikipedia. The largest wooden ship that we're aware of is the U.S.S. Wyoming. It was taken out of service in 1924 because the ship was simply so large that the stiffness of wood couldn't hold itself together. And for an explanation of that I have an AskScience discussion from Reddit, where people are askin' why can't you build a boat bigger than this, just add more wood.

SOURCE [50:06] Largest wooden boats in history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_wooden_ships

*Mako snorts*

SQEAKY: Well it comes to a point where once you get to a hundred-and-forty meters long, it doesn't matter how much more wood you add, the weight of the wood counteracts any amount of structure the wood can provide. It's just as big as it can possibly be you just need a stronger material.

SOURCE [50:20] r/AskScience Discussion on max size - https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1sbztl/why_is_there_a_limit_to_how_big_wooden_boats_can/

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So if you make it a foot longer, well if add a foot worth of height worth of that wood you're still breaking it. So the U.S.S. Wyoming, they used really good engineering to try to pass this limit, but even then the hull couldn't maintain its shape and they had bilge pumps that just emptied the boat of water constantly. So the entire time the ship was at water, they were burning coal to power steam-powered turbines to get it out of there and the thing still sunk. So yeah, not great. And even a couple of boats that were smaller than that, they all were just not structurally sound until you get much smaller.

MAKO: So you probably couldn't handle say, seven elephants on such a ship.

SQEAKY: Probably not. Y'know you might be able to handle seven elephants on such a ship, but I gotta wonder if Noah's family is equipped to first, build the largest wooden ship ever, and then handle seven elephants, and then, and then and then.

MAKO: Yeah. At the, the scale of productivity in the ancient times, this would be a mega-structure for them.

SQEAKY: Yes, yes it would have been a mega-structure. The common apologist rebuttal that I hear to this is "Oh God gave him the design" or "Oh God gave them special wood".

MAKO: Does this wood happen to assemble itself?

SQEAKY: The common argument I've heard for that is "They lived way longer back then. Didn't you see how these people lived like eight or nine-hundred years." And if you just ignore some of the time constraints in the story, you can get one- one guy in theory could build a boat this big, it would just take him, y'know, decades and decades. Ugh. It's ridiculous. It doesn't line up with anything we understand about how the world works, and that argument of insert magic here, insert God did it, it just shuts the discussion down.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Who actually knows about the material properties of wood on the spot when they're talking about the Noah's Ark story, right? When this gets brought up in reality you're like around the water cooler at work and somebody offhandedly mentions the Ark story and most people are like "Yeah, that rediculous" and then one guy is like "Well actually it's true, God gave him the plans for the boat" and everyone's like that's fucking stupid but I don't happen to know the material properties of would right now." Y'know we're all whatever your job is, not wood engineers. And even if you are. If you are a carpenter, right, are there any carpenters that make cabinets four-hundred-fifty feet long? That's not exactly common.

MAKO: No, not that I'm aware of anyway.

SQEAKY: So, it just shuts the discussion down. It's not a good faith argument. The obvious rebuttal that even a small child comes up with is "How did Noah get all the animals?"

MAKO: Yup.

SQEAKY: Yeah. He just couldn't have. And the common rebuttal from creationists or just people who believe in the flood is that "Well he didn't get every species, he got every kind." And then kind has this nebulous description that fluctuates so y'know maybe Noah didn't need to get one of every cat, he just got, y'know, two cats, and then after the flood cats evolved into the modern variety.

MAKO: Huh. Yeah even with that definition, even if you were to just acknowledge that dogs, cats, elephants, giraffes, ostriches, and bluejays, and- even go on and on and on and on like that. You're still gonna have too much.

SQEAKY: That's exactly where it goes so I pulled up some counts on the amount of species. According to Cal Academy, uh calacademy.org, it's the California Academy of something or other, they have science lessons. But according to them, there are millions of species, and tens of thousands of genuses. Genus is a group of species.

SOURCE [53:41] California Academy of scientists on species counts - https://www.calacademy.org/explore-science/how-many-species-on-earth

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So like all canids, are y'know, dogs, canines right?

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: So coyotes, wolves, dogs, right. At that level where you're talking about all cats, all bovines, all... I can't remember too many genuses, but every beetle, every crab, you're gonna get one of each of these things, yeah you're still left with ninety thousand fucken categories. And that's ignoring how bad the evolution argument is, right. The oldest date you had for one of these regional floods was what, 7600 years, or 13,000 years?

MAKO: Uh, 13,800.

SQEAKY: Yeah okay. For one of the floods that was way back, but even then most these writings that talk about a worldwide flood were from 3,700 years ago, or newer, right?

MAKO: Yeah. Well so the uh... the Younger Dryas was 13,800, the Black Sea deluge was 7,600, and the Burckle Crater was 5,000.

SQEAKY: Okay and then the writings, like the Sumerian creation myth was 3,800 years, right?

MAKO: The Sumerian creation myth was roughly eight- sixteen to eighteen hundred BC.

SQEAKY: Okay. So looking at all of these things, even if we go with the longest one, 13,000 years, you're not evolv- you're not re-evolving all biodiversity in dogs in 13,000 years.

MAKO: No.

SQEAKY: That's not how biology works. But, the argument there is "Well God did it. God took the different kinds and evolved them." Well if you're just gonna say God did it you can just say God created the water, God created all the species, why do we have Noah here complicating things?

*Mako finds this funny*

MAKO: Yeah why make the middle man, just cut him out.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Okay. Uh, I believe you added "What about all the flora?"

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: We discussed the fauna.

MAKO: You need entire ecosystems in order to support large animal populations and presumably those got wiped out in the flood.

SQEAKY: So no shit, having had this argument with people, the argument creationists use is "Vegetation mats."

MAKO: The fuck does that mean?

SQEAKY: "Grasses floated and they survived." And then they'll even go on to say that vegetation mats were huge.

MAKO: Uh... Do they not understand roots?

*Sqeaky laughs*

SQEAKY: Uh, they're creationists, they... their... their... biology is not their strong point.

MAKO: But like some of them have to have gardens. They have to understand roots!

SQEAKY: Maybe they're all into hydroponics.

*Mako sighs*

SQEAKY: Seriously one job I had, there was one software developer who was actually really smart. And actually when we played Magic, like the card game, right, he beat me most the time. So at Magic he was smarter than me, right. But he couldn't grock this very basic science thing where it's like the flood couldn't have happened. Dude was seriously a young earth creationist despite being an intelligent and capable software developer. Blah. Blah. Dysevidentia is real.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: Uh so yeah, I've got a... a bullshit source to the Ark Encounter of all places, where they actually use this argument. This shows the dishonesty here. 'Cause that actually might work for some grasses, right. You could in theory float some grass on water for forty days for forty nights and a year to evaporate all the water or whatever, and the grass might resettle down and then its roots might dig in just enough to get that going and in theory you could have some vegetation survive that. But not a giant redwood, right?

BULLSHIT SOURCE [56:43] Ark encounter bullshit on vegetation mats - https://arkencounter.com/blog/2012/08/31/noahs-floating-farm-of-animals-and-plants/

MAKO: Yeah no.

SQEAKY: That's not gonna happen. Or just trees in the rainforest, or just- Is this water saltwater or freshwater because if it's freshwater all of the seaweeds gonna die. If it's saltwater all the terrestrial plants, all the plants on land are gonna die.

MAKO: It's Schrödinger's water.

SQEAKY: Yeah. And that's- really is what the creationists are counting on. The... Their dishonest argument is "I'll find a way for one to work and now you have to accept it all." And trying to point that out, how dishonest that is, is a more nuanced discussion than just "You're categorically wrong." So people pushing creation myths go that way, and as long as they can get one, they can they say "Ah, God did it. God made a suitable vegetation mat for a redwood." What the fuck does that even mean?! Don't give me that shit. I've had people say that shit to my face.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: And just to hammer this home, how ridiculous this is, right. Of all the events and dates we talked about. The... the oldest one was hypothesized to be 13,000 years ago, right?

MAKO: 13,800.

SQEAKY: For people not familiar, one of the largest single organisms on the planet is named "Pando." It's a large clonal tree thing out in Utah. It's forty-three acres across and it is more than 14,000 years old. So it is older as fuck, right? It predates literally every single one of these flood myths and we can just go cut it open and look at the rings and see it's way fucking older than Christianity. It existed way before any of these floods, it existed way before Sumeria. I mean the Sumerian people and culture, right?

SOURCE [58:08] Pando, a candidate for largest single plant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_%28tree%29

MAKO: Yes.

SQEAKY: I'm sure it's not older than dirt. I mean it's a tree, it's growing in dirt. So where was this thing during the worldwide flood? Just the fact that this exists refutes the flood by itself.

MAKO: Yep.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Okay. You sort of touched on this earlier. How would we fit things in the boat?

MAKO: Yeah. There's just- there's too much that is required and then just- I think I also mentioned displacement somewhere, I mis- Yeah, there's a lot of things associated with just the... the size and the volume that is required for everything.

SQEAKY: The two arguments that Christians put forward, and I've had to deal with both in person, again for our listeners who don't believe me. Just remember I live in Nebraska. Trust that there are people this willfully ignorant all around me where I live. The two arguments are the boat was really lightly loaded so they could've built a reasonable boat, a boat that was three hundred feet long, just enormous but plausible, physics permit that, and then lightly loaded it and then the animals came off and micro evolved into their current forms which we point out was ridiculous for other reasons.

BULLSHIT SOURCE [59:05] Ark was kept lightly loaded - https://arkencounter.com/animals/how-many/

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Or, the boat was an engineering marvel designed by God and implemented by Noah and per that one, some rough math that creationists did, puts the boat's weight at approximately forty-seven million pounds.

BULLSHIT SOURCE [59:20] Or the ark was immense Weight of fully loaded ark - https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/61146/what-was-the-weight-of-noahs-ark-before-and-after-the-animals-were-loaded-on-to

MAKO: That's quite a bit.

SQEAKY: That's loaded with food and provisions. For perspective, our largest modern cargo ships are about 220,000 tons. Did I get the numbers wrong? 220,000 tons would be- Aw fuck.

MAKO: Do some math.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

*Typing sounds*

SQEAKY: Okay. So that puts it on the scale. So if our- some of our largest container ships are 220,000 tons loaded, I mean boats like the Ever Given, so big it clogs the Suez Canal, right?

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Made of steel, made by a company that knows how to make these powered with big diesel engines with the cargo of dozens of nations on it, this thing would be ten percent the size of that boat but made of wood and a fraction its length. So we're talking about something that is bigger than a wooden boat can be and holding more than any other wooden boat has ever held. And we can go back and compare this to the U.S.S. Wyoming. At those numbers it absolutely dwarfs it, so that number is ridiculous. You have to shut down conversation right there if you're gonna go past here because it can't be. So you're saying God did it, God made this boat buoyant at this weight despite it just not being big enough. And then somehow accept that Noah's family and the small amount of people helping them were enough to maintain- move... just moving forty-seven million pounds. Think about how much that would take for a small team of people, right? It's just- Even if we- Even if we somehow ballooned Noah's family up to forty-seven people, that's a million pounds per person. That's ridiculous. And somehow you're doing it all while the animals are alive and somehow you're doing it all without any of the food for the animals expiring or going bad.

MAKO: Without any of the animals attacking the humans or the other animals.

SQEAKY: And the explanation for that is often "God pacified the animals so they would be perfectly obedient to Noah." That's just- You just need to keep inserting "God did it" and you can solve all of these problems. It just isn't an honest argument.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: Or an honest discussion.

MAKO: Then it just keeps going back to well if God is just going to keep inserting themselves into this then why have a middleman.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Why do we need Noah?

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: My source for the number... Numbers on modern cargo ship is boatinggeeks.com. For the size calculated by Christians I have christianity.stackexchange.com. Actual thing, actual Christians asking questions.

SOURCE [1:01:29] Number on modern cargo ship - https://boatinggeeks.com/how-much-does-a-cargo-ship-weigh/

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: For how the Ark could be lightly loaded, I have the Ark Encounter as another source again. So bullshit sources there. And just- yeah. They either default to small load plus heavy evolution where God guides the evolution or big load, God guides the animal, God guides Noah. It always comes down to "God did it." Alright. One of the other common things that uh... Rebuttals that people thinking about this bring up: What about parasites and disease- diseases. Did Noah bring two tapeworms with him?

MAKO: I would hope not. Tapeworms are weird.

SQEAKY: Uh yeah, tapeworms are weird. But like every parasite. Did Noah bring two ebola viruses with him?

*Mako snorts*

SQEAKY: Did he bring two SARS-CoV-2 viruses with him? Y'know honestly the viruses wouldn't be that hard, 'cause if God made them all play nice he could stick them all in the same jar and just stick them in the corner of the boat.

MAKO: That's true.

SQEAKY: But more seriously, there's a bunch of parasites that are lethal to their hosts. So did he bring two of all of those? Did he bring enough hosts? Yeah, that- It doesn't fit. So the two arguments for this- and I've asked this to creationists who've given me both answers-

MAKO: Let me guess. A lot of these parasites are things created by Satan after the fact.

SQEAKY: Ah, close. They're created by God as punishments after the fact.

MAKO: Oh, okay.

SQEAKY: Yeah. And then- yeah. That would be a better explanation. If you're gonna have a villain, have your villain invent tapeworms.

*Mako and Sqeaky laugh*

MAKO: It does make more sense.

SQEAKY: Yeah you see you got one. And then the other answer is simply "Yes, Noah brought two tapeworms. God gave him the knowledge of how to safely care for tapeworms without infecting a host." Yeah. So Noah invented jars before we had glass or something. He put tapeworms in a wooden box? I don't fucken know. God gave him the knowledge to bring tapeworms.

MAKO: A transparent wooden jar? What?! If God's just giving you random magical things, why not transparent wood?

SQEAKY: One argument that befuddles these people because they're already denying evolution, but if you go straight to the evidence for evolution it really gets in the way of their story. Um, I find it's very effective to bring up the molecular clock. And the easiest way to get there is through genetic bottlenecking. The molecular clock is our ability to look at samples of animals, samples of their DNA, and we can with a fair amount of accuracy look at generations of animals and see the rate at which mutations occur. And this happens because we all have two lines of DNA, we all have our normal nuclear DNA that's in in the middle of our cells, and we all have mitochondrial DNA we get from our mothers, so these things can be cross-checked and cross-referenced against each other and they both reproduce at known rates... And I'll link to the Wikipedia page. I've already linked to the molecular clock Wikipedia page before. We explained this two or three times in previous episodes but it's really solid science, it's really good stuff.

SOURCE [1:04:01] Wikipedia on the molecular clock - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And when you get a bunch of samples of animals you can just see how fast that species- that line of DNA is evolving. And none of it coincides with the idea of a bottleneck for every species all together at once. It just doesn't, right. Some species weren't ever bottlenecked, right. Just pull up rats, right. No bottleneck. Pull up cats. Most- I mean house cats. No bottleneck.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: But then you pull up cheetahs? They had a genetic bottleneck about 10,000 years ago. So for all but one of these flood stories- sources, uh that just doesn't fit. So many of the flood stories put the flood at four, five, or six thousand years ago, but the cheetahs have been growing in population since and we know it 'cause we can track back their rate of mutation and how it changed, and we know about how many cheetahs there are in the wild because of this. So unless Noah somehow had specially gene-modifying large cats but not the largest cats, right, just none of this fits. Unless we want to go back to he brought cats on the boat and then God evolved them and gave them the illusion of age and DNA changing in which case God did it, you're shutting down the conversation again, it's just-

SOURCE [1:05:04] Cheetahs, for example, genetically bottlenecked before most ark myths - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8475057/

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: And I've gone there. Creationists just say or do whatever. Once it gets to God did it, they know they have license to say whatever.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: Blah. Then basic physics, right. Water. There isn't enough water for there to be a worldwide flood.

MAKO: Yeah. Where did all that water come from?

SQEAKY: So, actually having asked creationists, the most common answer I get is "The Firmament", right. So, depending on how you read it, the firmament can either be- No kidding. One of the creationists I was arguing said "The firmament was the crystal shell that all the stars were attached to that surrounded the Earth. It was actually water ice. God melted it." Then I'm like "Well, where did the water go after the flood?" He's like "Well God put it under the ground the ground." I'm like "But there's not enough room."

SOURCE [1:05:43] Talk origins on the flood non-sense - http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html#flood

MAKO: Yeah that's the other part of like well okay first you have to resolve "Where did the water come from?", but then like we don't- we're not on a water world right now so where did the water go, and there's no good answers for either of these things.

SQEAKY: The water went with Cotton Eyed Joe.

MAKO, disappointed: Hiya.

SQEAKY: You set me up for that really well, thank you.

MAKO: You're welcome.

SQEAKY: The arguments here do just boil down to "God did it." Some of them try to say that the water came up out of the ground, but then well rock doesn't flood, people say "Well there is a lot of water underground." Well yeah, between grains of dirt.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: It's why we have a water table. If you understand anything about digging a well or just that water sinks when you dump it on the ground, right, there's some level where there is water under there, it doesn't just come spilling out, it's not like a tank full of water that squirts it everywhere, it's-

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: This one Christian that I keep referring to, the software developer guy that I worked alongside, he literally just said that God got rid of the water. And then I asked him about modern day stars, he's like no no, God made the stars after he got rid of the firmament. Every time there was a gap in his knowledge- in his personal knowledge, he just inserted God. So he didn't critically think about the world around him, he didn't take into account anything, he didn't care what scientists said. If it contradicted his tiny God-based worldview...

MAKO: Then God did it.

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: So there are tons of scientific papers on there not being enough water to flood the whole world, there's scientists who've calculated how much water there is, there's scientists who discuss the idea of all the glaciers melting, there's scientists who've discussed the idea of a worldwide flood because an asteroid hit and melted and rained everything onto the earth, there's scientists who've put forward ideas for all of this and then said "What if the ice then froze into polar caps?" There's just no way that actually relies on physics that we have enough water for a worldwide flood. It just can't have happened because of the amount of water. So either God did it, or physics works. The on- The only- There's there's no physical way this could have happened.

*Sqeaky sighs*

MAKO: Yep.

*Sqeaky sighs*

SQEAKY: I've got a Talk Origins page to link there, and it links to dozens of scientific papers and Christian writings on this. Any other sources that we have? Oh yeah I linked to uh, for the cheetah genetic bottlenecking I linked to uh pubmed.ncbi, the URL's ridiculous. It's a government for-

MAKO: Yeah that's...

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: ...clearly like a scientific...

SQEAKY: Yeah.

MAKO: ...paper website.

SQEAKY: It is a repository by a government in Africa for academic papers.

MAKO: Yeah.

SQEAKY: I pulled that one up because I read it a really long time ago when I first learned about cheetah genetic bottlenecking I'm just like this belongs here, this contradicts these people and I've known about it for years, I don't know. I guess to summarize all this. There's a million holes in this story and Christians always plug those holes with "God did it."

MAKO: Or other things that could be trivially refuted which just makes them circle back to "God did it."

SQEAKY: The history for it, the naturally history, doesn't really line up. Even if we try to grant a regional flood, no strong evidence for a regional flood, zero evidence for a worldwide flood.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: Then if we go back to the literary history, the Christians clearly riffed off of other cultures.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: So, even if there was some sort of flood event, it wasn't the Christian god doing the event, it was the Sumerian god or something.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: And then backing it up even further. We got here because we kept running into people like this in real life who literally believe this today.

MAKO: Regrettably.

SQEAKY: Do we have any sort of jokes or anything funny with this other than just the ridiculous lessness of this idea?

MAKO: N.... Jokes? No. Just the observation that public education has failed them.

SQEAKY: To be fair a lot of these people are in Alabama.

*Mako laughs*

SQEAKY, laughing: I'm sorry I just keep picking on the southern states.

MAKO: Well they deserve it.

SQEAKY: How about something less silly? One of our, uh, raffle winners emailed me.

MAKO: Mhm.

SQEAKY: And they're flash drive is stuck in customs.

MAKO: Oh.

SQEAKY: There's a fee for them to pull it out.

MAKO: Great.

SQEAKY: I'm willing to pay the fee if we can get some more patreon supporters. But the flash drives already cost us a buttload of money 'cause they're really nice flash drives. So help out our raffle winner. Become our patreon supporter and I'll... I'll Venmo them some money or something. Too uh...

*Mako sighs*

SQEAKY: Too... Too shamelessly self-serving?

MAKO: A little bit.

SQEAKY: Is it nearly as self-serving as uh... stealing Sumerian creation myths and keeping them for yourself?

MAKO: Yeah I don't know.

*Sqeaky laughs and sighs*

SQEAKY: I'm telling people what I'll use the money for first.

MAKO: That helps a bit, sure. I don't know what to say there.

SQEAKY: Okay. So yeah, if someone wants to sign up and support us on Patreon for thirteen pounds we will take- Is it pounds? Thirteen euros? It was Spain. Our winner from Spain had it stuck in customs, it was thirteen local units of money. That's thirteen euros, right?

MAKO: Probably euros, yeah.

SQEAKY: Pesos?

MAKO: Not pesos. That's... that's Mexico. Pounds is Great Britain.

SQEAKY: Rubles?

MAKO: Rubles I think is Brazil isn't it?

SQEAKY: Rupees?

MAKO: That's Legend of Zelda.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: The other one outsmarted me and locked itself in my bedroom. Bumping noises.

*Mako sighs*

MAKO: I'm gonna have to-

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: Thanks to Qeldaar for video and graphics work, and thanks to AlphaWolf294 for transcription.

SQEAKY: Thanks to all of our Patreon supporters. Our supporters at the Evidence Investigator level or higher include Jarod, DuktTape, Qeldaar, and Lazori78.

MAKO: Thanks for listening, and don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend.

SQEAKY: Copyright 2021, BlackTopp Studios Inc.

MAKO: Intro was Slow by Pit X. Used with permission.

*Guitar riff*

SQEAKY: Rubles is Russia.

MAKO: Oh. Okay sure.

SQEAKY: What do they use for money in Brazil?

MAKO: I don't know. Oh, right, it's Reals. That's what I'm thinking.

SQEAKY: That's- Isn't that Venezuela?

MAKO: It might be both.

SQEAKY: We are way off in the weeds.

MAKO: Yeah. Real or Ree-al. I don't know how exactly it's pronounced.

SQEAKY: There's a whole Freakonomics episode about how the real came into being.

MAKO: Okay.

SQEAKY: But it's called the real because it's real money based on real value, and the previous currency was hyperinflating, so they said that everyday we're gonna adjust the price of this so that way you can buy the same market basket worth of goods at about two percent inflation per year, so they gradually shifted people to trusting this new money that had no backing, and they just kind of rotated out the hyperinflating currency and brought in the new one. It was kind of cool.

MAKO: Uh, Venezuela currency is the bolívar.

SQEAKY: Named after General Bolívar who fought the Spanish I believe? Fought a revolution to free the... kinda the whole continent.

MAKO: O-kay.

SQEAKY: Yeah I thought they cycled out the bolívar and brought in the reals, but I guess that was... I guess my memory there is just wrong 'cause I thought it was Venezuela doing both of these things. Alright, memory is fickle.

MAKO: Yep.

SQEAKY: I'ma edit that down to something.

MAKO: O-kay.

SQEAKY: Probably get some interstitials out of it.

MAKO: Sure.

SQEAKY: But thanks for listening everybody.

MAKO: Thanks for listening.

*Guitar riff*

MAKO: Warning.

*Mako clears his throat*

MAKO: Goddammit.

*Mako beats his chest*

SQEAKY: Project bro.

*Mako beats his chest more*

MAKO: Ah just... Something in my throat being thing.

SQEAKY: Yeah. Fewer blowjobs?

MAKO: Yeah. Don't kinkshame now.

SQEAKY: It's just a practical matter. It's sticky, it lines the throat.

MAKO: Ay, yes.

*Sqeaky laughs*

MAKO: What? I'm somehow supposed to correct that?

SQEAKY: I just- In the hour before recording fewer blowjobs, right. Instead of like three, how about one?

MAKO: Don't tell me how to live my life.

SQEAKY, laughing: Fine. Come to recording ready then, huh? Get that white shit off the microphone, gross.

MAKO: No. It's a ready snack. Sorry.

*Sqeaky laughs*

*Mako laughs*

*Sqeaky is still dying*

MAKO: You okay?

SQEAKY: I wasn't ready at all for that shit.