It is Thursday the 11th of December 2025, and you are listening to Skeptics with the K,

the podcast for Science, reason, and critical thinking.

Skeptics with the K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside

Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally. I'm your host. Mike Hall with me today is Marsh. Hello. And Alice. Hello. And it's our patron hang out today. It is. This evening we will be hanging out on our feed for people. I say a feed. I forget how technically we're doing it. We'll be hanging out on my couch while Mike technically makes the things work. We'll make the feed work. We'll make everything happen. We're mentioning it right at the beginning of the show, partly because I don't know if you guys have this experience as well. Quite often, there's times when the show goes out on the same day that we've got a meso skeptic social. Yes. The number of conversations I have with people that start with, I've only listened to half of the show so far. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll have been driving home from work, listened to the first half of the show, and then come to skeptics, I've not finished it yet. I don't know if some of them are saying, so don't tell me. Some of them are just trying to get to be like, oh, I want to make a point about something you said on it because I only listened to it just a few hours before. But it's really bizarre when your friends listen to a podcast. I find it very peculiar, especially because being autistic, I've got cheat code stories, right?

Of stories that I can tell.

Oh, did you know?

I grew up living next door to a murderer. Things like that. Stories that I can tell to try and stimulate conversation. But I meet strange people who come to skeptics and I tell them and they go, yeah, I know. Yeah, you already know that. Because they've heard it on the fucking show because I've used all my good stories. Oh, shit.

Yeah, and the same.

But our Patriot Hangout is tonight.

That is at 7 o'clock,

and it is available to all patrons. As long as you are a paid member of, it doesn't matter how little you're paying. As long as you are a paid member, there will be a post appearing on the patron feed, which will give you a link to tell you where you can go to hang out with us tonight. And that's going to be good. Yeah. Speaking of things we're doing on this show, on a recent show, I actually talked a fair bit about things people can do to get more involved in skeptical activities. A couple of people get in touch to say they're really, really appreciative of me saying that, to think about how they can take on kind of the

idea of becoming more of a sceptical activist. So I was really, really happy with that.

And one of the things that I suggested was about making complaints to regulators about various

things and how skeptics in the UK who might want to make a tangible difference can look for

misleading claims that they can find in advertising,

that they then report to the advertising standards authority. And then they're going to investigate

and take potential action against that advertiser. And how it's really quick to do,

and it can have like genuinely tangible outcomes. And it really can have a lot of tangible outcomes.

Just last week, in fact, I heard back from the ASA about a complaint

that I had made about British supplements. Those were the great British, Northern Irish

supplement company who were, I talked about them this show. They were making claims and they were

trying to find loopholes. But they were the breathing ones, no. They were the ones who were

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