The Skeptics Guide #1108 - Oct 3 2026

Julia Novella (0:03)

You're listening to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Your Escape to Reality.

Steven Novella (0:09)

Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

Today is Saturday, September 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Bob Novella (0:31)

Hey, everybody.

Steven Novella (0:33)

Jay Novella.

Jay Novella (0:34)

Hey, guys.

Steven Novella (0:37)

And we have two special guests on this episode, Christian Hubicki. Christian is so little new to podcasting, so he waved to the audience instead of speaking.

Christian Hubicki (0:49)

Good to be here.

Bob Novella (0:50)

Good to be here, Christian.

Steven Novella (0:53)

And for the first time on a full episode, she may have made a cameo on a previous episode, my daughter, Julia. Julia, welcome to the show. Hello.

Julia, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Julia Novella (1:07)

My degree is in astrophysics, and like many other people my age, I am not working in astrophysics. I do, my title is technically scientist, but I work at a lab doing cell stuff, not space stuff.

Steven Novella (1:24)

Doing cell stuff, yeah, but it's all data stuff.

Julia Novella (1:27)

Yes, data. Using Excel can be used pretty much anywhere, actually. It's really good for that.

Bob Novella (1:33)

Is that prison cell stuff? What kind of cells are we talking about?

Julia Novella (1:38)

Biochem cell stuff.

Bob Novella (1:39)

Okay.

Julia Novella (1:40)

Super fun. I got into that during COVID, doing COVID-related stuff, and it's been really boring ever since COVID has eased off. Day to day, regular degular, no pandemic, panic at all.

Jay Novella (1:54)

We need a good pandemic to hit through.

Julia Novella (1:56)

That would make things more exciting, yeah.

Steven Novella (1:58)

Yeah, it'd work. We'll work on that. Maybe this holy bowl of thing will really take off.

We are at DragonCon. We did record a live stage show earlier today, and we always like to do a private show while we're here, as well. When we're at DragonCon, we like to find, okay, what's the intersection of skepticism, the SGU, nerd culture, DragonCon, whatever, and try to come up with some kind of discussion topic that ticks all those boxes. We have a couple of discussions that we're going to start off with today. The first one is this. If you could, let's say you had an unlimited budget, and you had access to the best makers in the world to build you any costume you can imagine, what would you do? So what costume would you want them to build for? So this is like you have Weta Works working on it, ILM, whoever.

Anybody who could do any aspect of the costume that you need, and with no limit on budget. So Christian, you're going to go first.

Christian Hubicki (3:00)

Okay. All right. I've thought about this, Steve, and my answer is Zordon from Power Rangers. Okay.

I want to be inside of this. So now, there's a tube. It's like a transparent tube seemingly filled with fluid, and there's a projection of a head in the middle of this tube. But he talks is like, Power Rangers, you need to go and do this thing at this time, within 22 minute episode, whatever they say. Right? And I want it where, you know, I'm inside of this tube. I am driving it around, okay? And I want to be able to see all the people around, but I don't want them to be able to see me. I want them to be able to see through the tube. I don't care what kind of optical illusion stuff you have to do, so it looks like you're looking through the tube, but I'm in there, and it projects a version of Zordon, but it's going to be imitating my facial reactions and distorting my voice to be like Zordon, so I can be like one of those Disney roving characters that sasses people.

They're going to roll around, and then people will be rolling around, I'll be talking to someone, and then people will be hoarding up around me, and all of a sudden the head will turn around 180 degrees, talk to the person they thought they were out of the range. It's like, you cannot seek up on Zordon. That kind of thing. That's what I want to do at DragonCon, driving around. I think with unlimited budget, we can make that happen.

Jay Novella (4:24)

Yeah, you wouldn't need an unlimited budget to do it, but... Half unlimited.

Christian Hubicki (4:28)

Half, yeah, yeah, whatever that is. But yeah, I mean, I think the technical challenges are, one, the illusion that I'm not in the tube. But because it's a fluid, you have all these kind of refractive properties you could probably take advantage of, and some combination of mirrors. Embedding a lot of webcams around so I can have a 360 view of all the people that are like poking up at me so I can see who there is to interact with, and I just have a little remote control that drives, another remote control that changes which direction the head is going. I think that is a doable thing.