← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
Should You Fear the Sun? & Is There Anything to Astrology?
00:49:38
The surprising science of sunlight, the truth about astrology, and a fashion myth that isn't true.
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today on something you should know the wrong thing to say if you want your kids to eat healthy, then have the dangers of sun exposure been overblown? What about the benefits of sunshine? And what's the connection between sunscreen and skin cancer?
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You're gonna get me in so much trouble on this one. This is a hotly debated topic. Most studies that have been done that I've looked at use of sunscreen and skin cancer end up showing that more sunscreen use correlates with higher rates of skin cancer.
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Also, if you think wearing horizontal stripes makes you look heavy, think again. And astrology. Science has disproved it, but millions of people still follow it.
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Most people know or have access to the information that science has disproved astrology, but most of them have a personal experience with astrology that seems very convincing in an emotional level.
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All this today on something you should know. If you and I were to meet on the street, which would be lovely, there's an excellent chance that the clothes I would be wearing would be from Quince. And if you asked, I'd be happy to tell you about them. You know how when you discover a brand and suddenly you keep talking about it to people? Well, that's become me with Quince. Originally, months ago, I ordered a few things for myself. Their pants and some polos, cashmere sweaters. And right then I knew. I mean, the quality was so much better than I expected. What I like is their stuff feels elevated without feeling fussy. Their linen shirts and pants are great this time of year. Light, breathable, comfortable, but you still look put together. I just ordered some jeans recently, too, and they've immediately gone into regular rotation. And then you see the prices and it almost doesn't make sense because Quints cuts out the middleman and works directly with ethical factories. So you're paying for quality, not some big giant markup. Honestly, I recommend Quince to people all the time, and I'm recommending it to you. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.comSYSK for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comSYSK something you should know Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers have you ever begged a child to eat your broccoli because it's good for you? Don't do that. Don't ever do that. And I'll tell you why. I'm Mike, her brothers and welcome to SOMETHING you should know. So if you've ever asked a child to eat their beans or their carrots because it's good for you, you may have actually just talked them out of it. Research has found that preschoolers often believe that healthy food and and tasty food are never the same thing. So when adults say carrots will make you strong, smart and healthy, kids become less interested in eating them. In experiments, children actually ate less food when it was described as healthy than when the exact same food was described as tasty. Why? Well, young children seem to think food has one job, either it tastes good or or it's good for you, but not both. So the moment you start selling the health benefits, they assume the flavor must be the sacrifice. The takeaway for parents is surprisingly skip the nutrition lecture. Just put the vegetables on the plate, eat them yourself, and if you say anything at all, tell your children they're delicious. Sometimes the fastest way to get a kid to eat a carrot is is to stop explaining why they should. And that is something you should know. To hear people talk, you would think that going out in the sun is about the worst thing you could possibly do, for all sorts of reasons. And if you do go out, you better slather on the sunscreen if you know what's good for you. Curiously, the use of sunscreen is at an all time high and so is the rate of skin cancer. That seems odd to me. Sunlight has a lot of benefits that we seldom hear about. For example, it's an excellent source of vitamin D, but you have to go out in the sun to get it, and if you do, your skin can't be covered in sunscreen. The point is that the blanket advice of stay out of the sun as much as you can may not be very good advice at all. And here to explain all this is journalist Rowan Jacobson. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic, and many other places. He's the author of a book called in defense of the Surprising science of sun exposure. Hey, Rowan, welcome to something you should know.
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Hey, Mike. Really fun to be here.
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So, as someone who grew up as a kid being out in the sun quite a bit, I've noticed that in the last. I don't know, was it 30 years, maybe 40 years, there has been this shift from go out and be in the sun to be afraid of the sun, that the sun is dangerous, that sun exposure is going to kill you. And I don't know how that happened. How did that happen?
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A
Yeah, you know, your instincts are good. Basically, the messaging to avoid the sun started as we learned more about skin cancer and realized that there was a connection to sun exposure. If you get a lot of sun exposure, it does raise your risk of skin cancer. And I think part of the bigger story on this subject is that the order in which we learn information has a huge impact on what we end up doing about it. So, because that was kind of the first thing we learned about the sun was, oh, it's bad. It can raise your risk of skin cancer. So the messaging went out, avoid the sun. But then, as you were just saying, decade by decade, people have been getting less sun exposure. We've been spending more of our lives indoors. We've been putting on more and more sunscreen. But rates of skin cancer have continued to climb. So obviously, the story's not as simple as more sun exposure equals more skin cancer. It's going to be multifactorial. And then what has happened since then is sort of late in the game. Scientists have been learning more and more about these benefits of sunlight that we didn't know about before. But the horse had already left the barn, in a sense, and everyone had incorporated this messaging about avoiding the sun. So now we're in this weird little dance where we're trying to incorporate our understanding of the good parts of sunlight, which goes against the initial messaging.
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So here's what I find puzzling. I'm aware of the benefits, some of the benefits of being out in the sun. It's where we get vitamin D. It's good for your mental health. It's just there are plenty of reasons for to get exposed to sunlight, but when I go to the dermatologist, it's always naughty. You, you've been out in the sun. As if the dermatologists don't understand that there are benefits from being in the sun. I've never heard a dermatologist talk about the benefits of sun exposure. And there are many. The message is, always get out of the sun. If you have to go out, slather on the sunscreen, sunlight is bad.
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Yeah. And to their credit, the dermatologists, you know, they kind of have one job to do, which is reduce rates of skin cancer. So that's what their goal is. And it's, it's a worthy goal. So they're going to tell everybody, get less sun, because that's going to like, hopefully change the number on the one thing that's their responsibility. But built into that, you can see what the problem is. And it's a problem throughout the sciences and throughout medicine, which is that as we've gotten more sophisticated and our understanding of how the body works has gotten more complicated, unfortunately what's happened with the sciences is they become more and more specialized where there's very few people who are sort of, you know, the old school generalists who are, who are supposed to be thinking about overall health. And instead we have all these PhD specialists who are thinking about one tiny piece of the picture. So if you're a dermatologist, you're literally only thinking about reducing rates of skin cancer. So you're going to tell people, get less sun. If there are other conditions outside of dermatology that are going to be affected by sunlight, good or bad, that's not part of your consideration. As researchers have discovered some of these other health benefits, one of the comparisons that gets thrown out there is it's kind of like what if your orthopedist told you to stop exercising, you know, stop running so that you didn't hurt your knee? Because their goal was to reduce, you know, knee injuries and ankle injuries. And if they told you to never exercise, you'd be less likely to hurt your knee. But obviously that wouldn't be good overall because we know exercise does a lot of other good things for you. And starting to look like skin, like sun exposure, works kind of a similar way, where it's almost like exercise for your skin.
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The difference in that analogy, though, that comparison is interesting in the sense that no orthopedist ever says that, but dermatologists do.
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I think it's because in the case of exercise, we had a strong sense that it was good for us, you know, right out of the gate. And we actually, you know, I'm actually going to contradict myself now because I think way back we all did have a good sense just throughout history that the sun was a positive force. But then it was only in the 20th century, once we learned about skin cancer, that we suddenly flipped. And I think part of the problem was that people naturally like to be in the sun. It actually triggers natural endorphins in the brain, sunlight hitting skin, so everyone's naturally drawn to it. So when dermatologists and oncologists started telling people, don't get sunlight, it didn't work very well. Like, people kept going toward the sun, even, you know, even when they're. They're getting the tsk, tsk, tsk from their doctors. So then the messaging got stronger and stronger and stronger and probably left the science behind in an attempt to sort of, like, brute force people into doing what they wanted them to do.
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B
When you go out in the sun, this is something I've always been puzzled by. When you go out in the sun and you have sunscreen on that has a high SPF factor, so what is it protecting you from? Is it protecting you from just the damaging possibilities of the sun, or it's also protecting you from the potential benefits of the sun?
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A
That's an excellent question. That is a really good question, and that's a question a lot of scientists are asking right now. So sunblock, the way it's supposed to work, is it blocks the ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum, and those are the highest energy photons of light from the sun. And they're the ones because they have all that energy, they're the ones that can really damage our skin cells and damage DNA and start to trigger that process that leads to cancer. So those are the ones that get blocked by sunscreen, which lets in the visible light and a tiny bit of the ultraviolet light. But those ultraviolet wavelengths are also the ones that produce vitamin D in the body. And now we're learning other compounds like nitric oxide that are looking like they're really important. So, yeah, the sunscreen is going to block the good and the bad. And so then you start asking questions about the trade off, like, is is it more good or bad?
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And how much is it? And how much is too much and
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how much is too much? And I think that's a really important part of this discussion, is even the scientists that are starting to say, it looks like maybe we need to get more sun exposure than a lot of us are getting. They're not calling for lying out on the beach for eight hours. What they're really saying is a real deficiency in sunlight seems to be associated with higher levels of almost every disease you can think of. So you want to avoid a severe Deficiency of sunlight. You want to make sure you get a little. And most of the benefits seem to come from pretty modest exposure.
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B
You just said that not enough sunlight seems to have something to do with everything that could go wrong with us. I mean, those aren't your words, but basically that diseases are exacerbated by lack of sunlight.
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Yeah, and of course this is all correlation. So you can't prove causation without huge clinical trials. But when you look at populations, what you pretty much always see is that the ones that get very little sun exposure have higher rates of. Yeah, pretty much all of the chronic diseases of aging that you can think of, all the things that tend to get worse with age. So cardiovascular disease, which includes heart attacks and strokes, diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's, definitely depression and even certain cancers and autoimmune diseases, all these things are higher in populations that get very little light exposure. And back in the day when this data first came to light, people were like, well, we can't prove that it's causation. Maybe the healthier people are just going outside more. But they're going outside because they're healthier to begin with. But more recently, better studies have come along that really have shown that that does seem to be the case. And you can still argue about why it might be. But yeah, like people who get almost no sun exposure have significantly higher rates of disease and shorter longevity.
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I think an important question that people listening are probably wondering about is so how much sunlight is the right amount of sunlight? So I want to ask you that in just a moment. You know, I think a lot of people have something they could turn into a business, a product, a skill, some side thing their friends keep telling them they should sell. The problem usually isn't the idea. It's the process that comes afterwards. Website, payments, marketing, shipping, returns. Suddenly your little idea feels like a full time it job. Which is why Shopify is so smart. Shopify puts everything in one place. You can build a beautiful online store with their templates and their AI tools, help with product descriptions and headlines, and can even improve your product photos. And then there's the part most people never think about until it's too late. And that's actually finding customers. Shopify has email and social marketing tools built right in so you can reach people where they already are. There's a reason Shopify powers millions of businesses and 10%, 10% of all E commerce in the U.S. it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.comsysk go to shopify.comsysk that's shopify.comsysk so good, so good, so good.
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your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. We're talking about your exposure to sunlight. My guest is Rowan Jacobson. He's author of the book In Defense of Sunlight, the Surprising Science of Sun Exposure. And Rowan, you had said that a modest amount of sun exposure fills the bill, but how much is a modest amount of sun exposure? I know it's hard to give me a number, but give me a number. Like what is modest sun exposure? Is it an hour a day or is it, you know, five hours a day or 10 minutes a day?
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A
Yeah, and I can't give you a number because we are all so individually different. So there's just so many variables there. And one of the big ones is skin tone. Like some people who have very pale skin really shouldn't be getting too much sun exposure at all because they're very susceptible to skin cancer. On the other end of the spectrum, some people who have very dark skin have almost no risk of sun induced skin cancer and could really be benefiting a lot from more sun exposure. So it's a huge spectrum across the whole gradient of skin tones and then where you live and what time of year it is, that all plays into it too. So when I try to pin down scientists on this the way you just tried to pin me down, what they mostly have said to me is just don't burn and don't get anywhere close to burning. But if you have fair skin and you're in Southern California and it's summer, you're going to get enough light exposure just going about your day. Probably if you live in Minnesota and you have a more moderate skin tone and it's like spring or fall, you could probably benefit from an hour in the sun in the middle of the day and then, you know, so it's going to range. But I don't think unless you have really dark skin, then you can probably go a few hours and still get almost all benefits. Like Australia a couple years ago changed their guidelines from one size fits all into basically three different categories based on skin tone and their recommendations for people with dark Skin. And this is Australia, one of the, you know, the sunniest places in the world for people with dark skin. They said you don't need to worry about sunscreen, except in very extreme cases. If it's sunny, it's summer, and you're going to be out all day, then wear a hat and maybe use sunscreen if you want. But other than that, you're going to get almost all benefits from the sun. On the other hand, for people with very fair skin, they said pretty much use sunscreen all the time just to be safe.
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You had said before, and I've heard this before as well, that the incidence of skin cancer is going up and yet more and more people are staying out of the sun and putting on sunscreen. So how does science explain that?
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Science dodges. In that case, there hasn't been a healthy effort to try to explain that one, to wrap our heads around it.
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Well, is it true? Is it true that skin cancer rates are going up?
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Yes. And part of the explanation, and everyone pretty much agrees on this, is that it's diagnosis. Like, we're looking a lot more than we used to. So you look for anything more, you look more carefully, you look at everybody, you're going to find it more. And this is especially the case, we know, with melanoma, where there weren't that many people getting full body checks every year back in the day. So probably some melanomas got missed. And that's kind of also reflected by the fact that melanoma incidence has been rising very quickly for 40 or 50 years. But melanoma mortality hasn't changed at all and has actually been going down in recent years. So when you see incidence and mortality going in opposite directions, that's often a sign of over diagnosis. But in this case, over diagnosis might not necessarily be a problem. Like, if you're finding things that will turn into melanoma very early and removing them, that's not a bad thing. Even if you're erring on the side of caution and removing a bunch of things that would not turn into melanoma. Like, I know if I had one, and my doctor said there's only a 30% chance this is going to turn into melanoma, I'd still say get rid of it. The other piece of that, that's demographics, is that, you know, we're getting older as a country, we're living longer than we did 50 years ago. So we have a lot more people who are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is when you tend to
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get cancers right how convinced is science that sunblock prevents skin cancer?
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A
Yeah, you're gonna get me in so much trouble on this one. This is a hotly debated topic within the industry and the academy among the experts. That debate doesn't tend to filter out to the mainstream media very often. But most studies that have been done that I've looked at use of sunscreen and skin cancer end up showing that more sunscreen use correlates with higher rates of skin cancer.
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What?
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A
There's these data sets out there, and more often than not, that's what they show. Again, it's just a correlation. So what does that mean? And one argument had been that, well, sure, people who use more sunscreen are going to get more skin cancer because who's using more sunscreen? People who are spending more time in the sun, or people who might have very fair skin and might need it more. So of course they're going to get more skin cancer. But then later studies came along and adjusted for that. And there's often still higher rates of skin cancer in the sunscreen users, the ones who use sunscreen more. So it's unclear, but that doesn't make sense to anyone because in the lab, you put sunscreen on a mouse and it effectively blocks the UV from hitting the mouse and will lower the mouse's chance of getting skin cancer in the lab. So why doesn't that necessarily translate to the real world is unclear. But the experts I've spoken with definitely do think that proper use of sunscreen, of modern sunscreens, will reduce your risk of skin cancer. They're just waiting for better studies to come along to show that. I think part of the issue here is that sunscreen formulas have changed quite a bit over the years. The old ones were just not very good, and that's clear. They only blocked UVB rays, not UVA rays. And at the time, people thought UVB was the only ray that could cause skin cancer. We now know that UVA is actually probably a significant cause of skin cancer. So those old sunscreens were keeping you from burning because the UVB is what causes a burn. But we're not blocking UVA and in fact might have allowed you to stay out in the sun longer and get more UVA because you weren't burning. So those, like those sunscreens from the 60s, 70s, and 80s were probably pretty bad news. The new ones are a lot better than that.
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B
I remember hearing, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years ago that one of the reasons that there's more incidents of skin cancer has to do with holes in the ozone and that the sun is, you know, hot. I don't remember what the arguments were, but is that, is any of that true or has the sun stayed pretty much a constant and we're changing somehow?
- [25:25]
A
That was. There was an era when that was true. And it was mostly an issue in like Australia, New Zealand, with the use of certain chemicals in like spray products and things like that. We started to eat away at the ozone that blocks certain amounts of UV. There's an ozone layer in the atmosphere that blocks UV. And we got this ozone hole in the like 70s and 80s, it really started to become apparent. But then we had the Montreal Protocol and got rid of the class of chemicals that was eating up that ozone. One of the great environmental successes of all time, probably. And so those holes have closed pretty much everywhere. And the last remaining ones are continuing to close. So we pretty much fixed the ozone problem and that was a great success. But your question about, did something about us change? I think that is a big key to this whole thing. Because back in the day, historically, skin cancer was not an issue. You don't really see it being talked about by anyone before the 20th century and then especially after World War II, it kind of explodes out of nowhere and continues to just rise and rise and rise through the second half of the 20th century and into today. So what changed? The sun didn't get any stronger. And if anything, we get less sunlight per person than we did back in the day when everyone was a farmer or when most people were farmers. We have more indoor jobs today than we did in the 19th century. So it seems like something about indoor life is partly responsible for this rise of skin cancer.
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B
Well, the other thing we haven't talked about that people have said about sun exposure is it causes wrinkles, it ages the skin prematurely.
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A
There's no argument on that one. Sunlight damages the collagen and the elastin in your skin. And these are a couple of different proteins that give your skin its suppleness and its springiness. And just like, you know, sunlight will damage your, your upholstery, right? It kind of chews up those, those proteins that give your skin its bounce. And so that eventually leads to wrinkles. And there's no question. So then I guess, you know, that's the trade off question. Like if it's improving your, your health, but it's giving you wrinkles, maybe that's like what healthy old age should look like.
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B
Well, you've certainly answered a lot of questions that I've had about this that you don't hear from dermatologists, which is basically stay out of the sun and use a lot of sunscreen. And that's really the blanket response that I've ever gotten. I've never heard anyone say, no, you should go out in the sun a little more. No one's ever said that. So it's good to hear some balance in this. It's probably time that we heard that. I've been speaking with Rowan Jacobson. He is author of the book In Defense of Sunlight the Surprising Science of Sun Exposure, and there's a link to his book in the show Notes. Rowan, thank you so much.
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Thanks, Mike. It was my pleasure. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. Plan B is a backup birth control option that's there for you when things
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If astrology is nonsense, why won't it die thousands of years after it began? Millions of people still check their horoscope, know their zodiac sign, consult astrologers for advice about love, money and life decisions. In fact, astrology may be more popular today than ever. So how did this ancient belief system get started? Why has it endured so long? And when science puts astrology to the test, what happens? Here to explore the surprising history and scientific reality of astrology is Carlos Orsi. He's an award winning science journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering science and he is author of the book what Science says About Astrology. Hi Carlos. Welcome to something you should know.
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C
Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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B
Sure. So I have a question. You know, for the longest time, people have been able to, back in the day, open the newspaper and get their horoscope. People can go online and get their horoscope for the day where does that come from?
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C
Well, nowadays artificial intelligence can do horoscopes because there are certain sets of rules and certain, even stock phrases that go into horoscopes. They can really be easily combined. That's something that scientific tests have done. They created random horoscopes from stock phases, and people really can't distinguish them from the real thing.
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B
And so what is the real thing? Where did astrology come from and what is it exactly?
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C
Well, astrology is the idea that the position of the stars into stars and planets in certain key moments, perhaps when you were born, or when you open a business, or when you meet the person you perhaps believe you are in love with, that this configuration of the sky says something important about the event, about the person who was born, about the relationship that is starting, about the business that is beginning. And that following a set of rules that was sort of codified some 2000 years ago by a guy called Claudius Ptolemy, you can say something about that moment, the relationship, the person, about its future, about its characteristics, and about the main events that will happen to it in the future.
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B
Modern astrology is pretty modern then, is there ancient astrology? I mean, how far back were people coming up with these ideas that your birthday or the stars or whatever it was would determine your future?
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C
Well, it starts some 3,000 years ago in Babylon and Mesopotamia, the, the credible of civilization really, when people were very, very anxious about the future as they are today. And at that time, they were very attentive. The priests of the time, they were very attentive to omens. Things that happen and everything has a meaning, had a meaning. Everything was a message from the gods. And there were a whole family of omens that were. They called the sky omens. It included the shape of clouds, the flocks of birds, thunderstorms and planets and stars. Back then, people didn't really distinguish between meteorology and astronomy. And they started compiling things that they saw in the sky and trying to correlate them to things that happened in the real world and in time. And we really don't know how this process happened. The first two things happened. They separated the astronomical phenomena from the purely meteorological phenomena. Perhaps they noticed that the stars on planets had regularities and cycles and were much more predictable than other things that happen in the atmosphere, like birds and clouds. And they separated it from religion. The stars and planets sort of stopped being seen as, as gods or messengers from the gods, and started being seen as things from nature. But that had some kind of connection with the real world, with things happening on Earth. But at some time, some 2500 years ago, we find in the archaeological register in the libraries of Babylon the first personal horoscopes that describe the position of the stars at the moment of birth of a child and say that because of these stars, this child will have a life that will be such and such. So the first personal horoscope that we know of was made in Babylon around 400 BC.
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B
Is there any sense or any way to know how many people use astrology either for fun or even for something more serious than fun, but how many people are looking at their horoscopes?
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C
Well, we don't have these numbers exactly, but there was a Pew Research published 2025 saying that there is a very considerable proportion of the American population that follows horoscopes. It's less than 50%, mainly women and LGBT people and the astrological apps for cell phones and things like that. They are a huge economical success. They're one received a few years ago an investment. And it wasn't an investment from wizards or astrologers. It was an investment from people really interested in making a profit investment from the investment fund of more than $50 million. So it's big business.
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B
And yet I wonder if you ask those people, and if I'm correct, you said it's less than 50%, but it's still a substantial number, how many of them really believe what they're seeing?
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C
Well, yeah, there is this a common argument that there is what people may call the recreational use of astrology. People just read it for fun or for laughs and they aren't really taking it seriously. And even if the majority of, let's say astrology users are recreational users first, it still may have some influence. And there was a research, a scientific, social science and psychology research conducted in China of all places, where Western astrology became a big thing. And they found out that HR professionals there are really less prone nowadays to hire people from Virgo, for instance.
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B
Really, they would be less likely to hire someone whose astrological sign is Virgo.
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C
Most interesting part of the of this research was that the one of the scientists, he made three different profiles in, in a Chinese very popular Chinese dating app. And the only difference between the profiles was the, the sign of the, of each profile. And the guy, the profile with virgo sign had 60% less matches than, than the other two. So even when people aren't really perhaps so much into astrology, it still can affect their behavior or how they see others. And it can be a problem.
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B
So I assume, in fact I've heard that Astrology has been researched and from a scientific point of view there is nothing to it. Is that a fair statement?
- [37:38]
C
Perfectly fair. There is really nothing to astrology. And even from the antiquity, from the times of the Roman Empire, there were people thinking about it and saying, come on man, it doesn't make any sense. But I mean we only had arguments, we didn't have data. Now in the 20th century with computers and census data and all that, scientists, psychologists and social scientists, they really did very deep and these of astrological predictions about how people should behave, about personality, about the correlations, the purported correlations between star charts and human behavior. And they crunch the numbers several times. There are hundreds of studies and they always came out empty handed.
- [38:26]
B
There is really nothing to it, and yet it persists. People still turn to it even though I imagine they know there's nothing to it.
- [38:37]
C
There is a very interesting point there because there is a difference between emotional conviction and intellectual conviction. I think most people know or have access to the information that science has disproved astrology, but most of them perhaps have a personal experience with astrology that seems very convincing in an emotional level. And I think that's the most interesting thing about astrology. They have this, I don't know how to define it. They have this linguistic technology that make astrological statements sound very personal and very to the point, even when they are really, really totally generic. My favorite of these astrological statements is one that goes something like that. You have a talent, you have a capacity that you are still not being able, you have still not been able to use to your advantage. I mean, think about it. It's true for everybody, right? I mean it can be stand up comedy, it can be playing a musical instrument, it can be, perhaps you think you are a good, you could be a good salesman or a good politician, but you never had the opportunity. It's true for everybody, but it's true in a very different context for any single person. So the astrologer says that it's generic, but when people listen, they may come to think that it was really meant to them. How did this guy know that I always wanted to be a politician? Well, he didn't. He just threw something there and you fill the gaps inside your mind. That's how astrology really seduces people. It has this linguistic technology that as a writer, I think it's very, very powerful and it's impressive. It's impressive.
- [40:36]
B
Do you think or is there evidence that the people who give us astrological readings, when you go into one of those places and you sit down and tell them this. Do you think that those people think this is real? That the people providing the service, or do they know this is all baloney, this is just a way to make money?
- [41:00]
C
I think that the majority of them really think they are doing something serious. They are doing some very professional work. They really believe in their own powers because it creates a. There's a cycle. I mean, even if you. If. Even if one of them, some of them started doing, okay, I know this is bold, but I'm going to make money. Then they get the feedback from the clients. And the clients are so impressed that they, okay, perhaps there is something to it you can read. Not even from astrologers. You can read statements and. And interviews with psychics, even former psychics. People work as psychics. And then left. And they say that the feedback of the clients is very powerful, that they. Even if they start as conscious charlatans, there is a point when they start believing in themselves because the feedback is very powerful.
- [42:01]
B
In my mind, I tend to lump astrologers and psychics and mediums kind of all in the same thing, but they're actually different. But why do people seem to lump them all together?
- [42:17]
C
Because people look for them or search for their services for similar reasons, right? I mean, everybody has insecurities. We live in a very uncertain world. We would like to have our guesses and our desires validated. And that's something that. If you get one of these guides about how to be a good psychic or how to be a good astrologer, one of the first things that you find is this piece of advice. Most of the people that will consult you, they already know what they want to hear. They already know what they want to do. They just want something to validate their. Their own preconceptions or the decisions that they already made. So there is this. People search for these services for the same reasons. And these professionals, they use the same techniques. This technique of saying something that is generic but sounds personal is a technique that is common to all of them.
- [43:25]
B
There's another part of this that I find interesting that I'd like you to comment on. You often hear people talk to other people and they'll say, oh, you're a Capricorn. Oh, you're an Aries. I can tell you're an Aries. As if something is emanating from their behavior or what they say that has some characteristic that applies to that sign. What is that?
- [43:52]
C
Well, the astrological description of the signs brings a sort of stock personality traits. And you can say, okay, so a Capricorn is someone that tends to be cold and very competent professionally and very worried about money, for instance. Or a Virgo is someone who is very perfectionist and wants everything right. And a Taurus is a dependable, a trustworthy friend and things like that. But the point is, if you read this, this personality statements about, about the signs first. There are lots of characteristics so you can always pick and choose. So you can, okay, so this guy is a Capricorn, but hey, but he's waste all his money. Yeah, but he's a very, a very cold and non emotional person. So okay, you ignore the prediction that he would be good with money and you fix on the prediction that he's going to be an unemotional person. So you can sort of pick and choose.
- [45:01]
B
So there's nothing about that that has any validity at all because you were born during this time that you have these characteristics. Scientifically, that's been debunked.
- [45:16]
C
It has been debunked several times. But there is a curious wrinkle in that. There was a study made in the 1970s that asked people to answer questions about their personalities. And the first time they studied and compared the results with what the stereotypical astrological characteristics from their birth dates. The first time this experiment was made, the researchers were astounded because it sort of confirmed the astrological tenets. But then they separated the answers from people who were astrology students from the general public. What they concluded was that the people who are really into astrology tended to answer the personality questions in a way to confirm what they thought their personalities should be because of their signs. And of course, the people who didn't know about astrology just gave the answer that they thought was the most cogent to the question.
- [46:25]
B
Well, it is fascinating and I guess it's kind of the conclusion you've come to is that even though this isn't true, it scratches an itch for people.
- [46:35]
A
It's.
- [46:36]
B
It's hard not to look, it's hard not to see something there, even though there is nothing there.
- [46:45]
C
Yes, I think at best astrology is a structure in which people can plug in their intuitions, their feelings and build a sort of narrative that unites all of that. But the, I think it can be perhaps healthy or helpful for some people. But the problem is the structure is fictional. So if you start taking it seriously, it will lead you to bad consequences because you will be making decisions and interpreting the events of your life based on things that really aren't there.
- [47:25]
B
You found Something really interesting that I would have never thought about. And. And that is the content of the daily horoscopes in newspapers and magazines that people have read for generations. There's something about them you found. Go ahead and explain.
- [47:41]
C
There are some scientists in social sciences that made content analysis of what these horoscopes say, and it's sort of depressing because they conclude that they just reinforce stereotypes and prejudices. There is one analysis that said, okay, you can predict the social class of the readership of a magazine just by reading the horoscope page of that magazine. The horoscopes in magazines for poor people, they say, you must save money. You must be careful the way you talk to your boss. And horoscopes in magazines, on high end magazines for wealthy people say, oh, you should go on a trip. You should spend some money in some new things to make you feel better. So it's all. It just reinforces the stereotypes, gender stereotypes, social class stereotypes.
- [48:40]
B
Well, I'm not a big follower of astrology, never have been. But I find it fascinating that so many people are, and I enjoyed our conversation about it. Carlos Orsi has been my guest. He is a science journalist and author of the book what Science says About Astrology. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. All right, Carlos, thanks so much.
- [49:02]
C
Okay, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [49:08]
B
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