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Erika Ishii joins Hank to ask can foxes be domesticated, is the placebo effect getting stronger, and will shapeshifting ever be possible?
00:00 Introduction
04:58 How sharp can a katana be sharpened?
12:56 What is a historical unsolved mystery you want an answer to?
22:33 Are foxes really self-domesticating?
30:43 Is the placebo effect getting stronger?
38:59 How do we teach people to develop empathy?
51:56 Will we ever be able to shape shift?
The PBS Eons episode we reference:
This episode was filmed on August 19th, 2025. The entire conversation has been reviewed by our fact checker and meets Complexly’s editorial standards.
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Her teeth and wide smile creep me out. Youtube keeps recommending me this video because I have watched every other video here. But I really just can't watch this one its uncanny valley for me for some reason
It was great to hear a little materials science make its way onto the show! For a little more detail on blade steel coming from a metallurgist, a key concept in materials science is the stress-strain curve, which shows how much a material deforms (strain) under an applied force (stress). Strength is determined from this curve and is the ability of a material to withstand stress without permanently deforming or failing.
To keep things simple (though it's more complex than this), you can think of hardness as a local measure of strength, so the two are directly correlated. Since both describe resistance to deformation, a harder, stronger blade is less likely to roll or deform at the edge, so it holds a better edge.
The issue is that as steel gets harder and stronger, it becomes more brittle and less tough. Toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and deform without fracturing. If you maximized hardness for a very sharp, long-lasting edge, a large impact (like swinging a blade into something) could crack or even shatter it. You want a blade that can flex and deform a bit, both elastically (temporarily) and plastically (permanently), so it doesn't just crack or snap, but is still hard and strong enough to hold an edge and not bend easily.
The key is balancing these properties in a blade steel with the specific application in mind and possibly using techniques like edge hardening where only the edge is heat treated to increase hardness while the spine and body can remain softer and tougher.
what a delightful episode ty erika
Why can we hear the proper order of adjectives frequently, even though much of the time we were never taught the correct order?
21:01 Exo-Squad, a Saturday morning cartoon fr9m when I was a kid, explored coexistence (or more accurately conflict with) a genetically engineered humanoid… of course humans made them stronger and smarter than themselves and treated them as servants and that was the crux of the conflict in the show.
Cutting up dead bodies and animals for science. Pretty sure Sherlock Holmes did that in every book
Next we need lou wilson and aabria iyengar and we'll have had the whole worlds beyond number crew
not the ground news sponsorship :/
to be fair she really is Supernatural in Ghost of Yotēi.
Another aspect is that both wolves/dogs and foxes are canids, so would you see these same domestication syndrome traits in a different type of animal? Are they part of a syndrome of all domestication or just that of similar-ish animals?
can you please get erik from internet comment etiquette on this show
I often mourn the phantoms of other human species and it’s cool to hear that Hank does too haha
I often mourn the phantoms of other human species and it’s cool to hear that Hank does too haha
I don’t wanna point out about the katana thing, that many people go into shock from something like that immediately before they have time to realize what has happened. So it would be different for everyone but yeah some people would probably bleed out before they even process the fact that they have been bisected. It’s not universal that you would know what’s happened
Can we get Forrest Valkai the show?
29:10, any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science
Aren't there sponges that can reconstruct themselves after being blended? And don't butterflies in a cocoon have a just-ooze-and-tiny-disks stage that they reconstruct from after they are caterpillars? Isn't that sort of TI-1000 adjacent?
There’s a 1981 film called Quest for Fire that follows a group of archaïc humans in search of a replacement for their tribe’s fire that went out. There is no comprehensible-to-modern-people dialogue, and it was made with significant involvement from anthropologists, and while our understanding has developed significantly since then, it’s still really good.
I'm sure that some amount of the placebo effect is people not wanting to be rude. So up until the point that they're convinced it does nothing, people might tell little white lies. This is totally consistent with Hank's theory that increased medical exposure is causing the rates to go up. If someone's forced to commit to whether or not they see an effect early, they're less sure at that point, and can be guided even more by social conventions. That in itself, could lead to lock-in.
We are getting close to red things go faster orcs
If you want to live with a wild animal, get an Australian Cattle Dog. It’s like having a coyote that sleeps on your couch.
33:40 This is actually how I use spiritual things like crystals, I know they probably don't "work", but the fact that other people believe they do allows me to utilize the placebo effect in them to get a benefit out of it even if I don't believe in it as fully as others do.
Wow, they must've recorded this quite some time ago already if the ghost of Yotei wasn't out yet
I was really hoping Hank would "phone a friend" and call Maya, because Maya would be the perfect person to explain why you should NOT KEEP FOXES AS PETS
Hank telling Erika that foxes are basically pre domesticated foxes is like when he told Brennen to swim when asked how to fly 😂
I have debilitating backpain. Sometimes hurts to breath, pretty much always hurts to walk and stuff. Afew years ago I was stressed out and went to visit friends in England, and while I was there I was pain free. Had pain before and after, still have it today. Doctors have mentioned that some pain is caused by depression and stress, and anti-depressants can actually help to cure pain by making ye feel better emotionally.
why is sweden trying so hard to become america?
Wanda is a reality warper. The justice league have no counter against that. Assuming there is no prior knowledge and both teams have to assess each other live, JL loses. Point blank. They don't know to focus Wanda. They're going to be more worried about the Valkyrie and super strong star spangled blonde that is shooting energy blasts from her hands to worry about the emo chick in the back.
by the time they do know she's actually the biggest threat on the field, it's too late.
Wait, what a humble brag name drop. Andrew Huang is in your band?? That’s wild
"is there a group of people you have in mind with this question"
Republicans Hank. It's okay. We all know it's Republicans.
Why is my dog coat so specific but it also looks exactly like so many other dogs? Like he has a white strip between his eyes and across his nose and a white chest, but everywhere else is black.
Hank and team! I have another approach to answering Erika's question about teaching empathy. I firat encountered the idea studying Edward Said's philosophy of Orientalism, where he describes the othering narratives used by colonisers to justify and support their encroachment into Middle Eastern nations. He also does some work describing how to undo these othering narratives for people. He established the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, in part to help do just that for young people in Arab nations. The documentary Knowledge is the Beginning (here on YouTube) follows a lot of that journey. Prepare tissues. I more recently came across the idea as the Power of Contact Methodology, used by my previous employers in their mental health and addiction programmes to reduce stigma. The methodology is based on research and establishes a number of things that have to happen for the stigma reduction to take place beyond just proximity. From my report: "For the Power of Contact to be effective in reducing stigma, it requires the following conditions (Case
Consulting Ltd., 2005):
❱ equal status
❱ the opportunity for individuals to get to know each other
❱ information which challenges negative stereotypes
❱ active cooperation
❱ pursuit of a mutual goal."
I'm sure it's called other things in other places. But we can and do teach people to widen their circle of empathy all the time.
How are we not talking about the Russian Fox Experiment and how they DID back-breed the foxy-fox traits back into the foxes over the next several generations. First, the foxes were bred for domestication, and they started looking like dogs. But then they did several more generations where they re-introduced wild, not domestic, foxes back into the breeding program. Then they took the most-foxy-least-doggy looking kids from THAT generation, and started breeding for domestication all over again. And they got back to a fox that looked like a fox but was domestic like a dog.
Or last I heard, that's how it went. Correct me if you know better.
P.S. There's a board game "The Fox Experiment" by the designer of Wingspan.
Huge question about the placebo question: is it just the positive placebo effect that's getting stronger or also the negative "nocebo" effect?
Man, I didn't think I was gonna be triggered by the sword and anatomy talk but whew, that was intense.
Shout out to whoever did the captions. "Hank: [wheeze-laughs]" is classic.
This woman mugs so hard she should have a handle on the side of her head
33:27 My speciality is religious studies and Hank just described the exact progression in placebo that find in religious healing as well as some psychic and medium consults.
1:09:49 Chakravarti is a crazy but awesome surname.
why would I want to hear from these jackasses
I love how much Erica nerds out about these questions. That's how I often feel, but I don't really have people who would engage me in these types of discussion.
22:42 I totally would not have guessed that after listening to worlds beyond number. /s
;D